Top 100 The Cold War Quotes
#1. The war against terror is every bit as important as our fight against fascism in World War II. Or our struggle against the spread of Communism during the Cold War.
Jim Bunning
#2. Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.
James Buchan
#3. It was something that we learned more and more about as we got older in different chapters of our lives on how important the victory was, not as a sporting event but as a victory in the Cold War.
Jim Craig
#4. The Persian Gulf crisis has forged a new world order in which the superpower adversaries of the Cold War now stand united to reverse Iraq's conquest of Kuwait ...
George H. W. Bush
#5. But scientists on both sides of the iron curtain played a very significant role in maintaining the momentum of the nuclear arms race throughout the four decades of the Cold War.
Joseph Rotblat
#6. We are living in a new ice age, and we need to apply the recipes of the Cold War to the Kremlin. That means isolation instead of offers of negotiation. And Ukraine should have been supplied with weapons long ago.
Garry Kasparov
#7. The technique of beaming a ray on to window glass and reading from the vibrations the conversation going on inside had been used against the American embassy in Moscow in the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.
Frederick Forsyth
#8. Every generation faces a challenge. In the 1930s, it was the creation of Social Security. In the 1960s, it was putting a man on the moon. In the 1980s, it was ending the Cold War. Our generation's challenge will be addressing global climate change while sustaining a growing global economy
Eileen Claussen
#9. I get enough of that on the news, so I didn't want to deal with fundamentalists or any sort of thing like that. I just wanted to keep it as lighthearted as the Cold War was, which obviously it was a fun time for everybody.
Adam Reed
#10. 'the softest, sweetest part of the Cold War, the only truly interesting part, the war of ideas.
Ian McEwan
#11. Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.
Ronald Reagan
#12. The blow back from the cold war is that a weakened Russia allowed Afghanistan to become a failed state, and then all this weaponry to flow into all these other conflicts. Our greatest triumph has almost fueled our most intractable battle now.
Jon Stewart
#13. The Cold War began with the division of Europe. It can only end when Europe is whole.
George H. W. Bush
#14. For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.
Conrad Black
#15. The Cold War may be 'over' for the West. For the Soviets it has entered a new, active and promising phase.
Anatoliy Golitsyn
#16. With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.
Jack Kemp
#17. I would say that in 2000, we understand as much about how today's system of globalization is going to work as we understood about how the Cold War system was going to work in 1946.
Thomas Friedman
#18. A blanket could be used to warn your enemy that you are coming - and that you are warm. Where's the cold war when you need it?
Jarod Kintz
#19. Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
Alan Furst
#20. The Cold War was really the great struggle of the 20th Century and it shaped American political life from top to bottom.
Jeff Sharlet
#21. For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn't start in Berlin - it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily.
Yanis Varoufakis
#23. I think if someone else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened.
Eduard Shevardnadze
#24. Ronald Reagan's era can be defined, number one in most people's minds, by the Cold War and by the end of it - and by the strong principles he stood for.
Marco Rubio
#25. It is extremely important that mass media, having freed from the relics of the Cold War, served for peace and dialogue between nations and religions, the rich and the poor, countries and continents.
Nursultan Nazarbayev
#26. The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
David Remnick
#27. In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
#28. The United States has dealt with the Middle East and surrounding regions for many decades in the context of the Cold War.
Stephen Kinzer
#29. Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War - both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There's a pulse to it.
Diane Kruger
#30. The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
Russell Banks
#31. In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.
Ian McEwan
#32. I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.
Tony Judt
#33. A clear look back on the Cold War's battlegrounds, along with a sense of relief that the world survived forty-five years of confrontation, evokes feelings of humility and regret.
John Lamberton Harper
#34. So you're quite right that when ... as the Cold War grew and expanded out of Europe, we ourselves had to take refuge behind the shield of the Monroe Doctrine.
E. Howard Hunt
#35. During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
#36. Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union's seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world.
Garry Kasparov
#37. The Cold War is a psychological game, that is dangerous and counterproductive in the extreme - it does not lead to a benevolent understanding among states - just hatred and discord, in this case, will be sown.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#38. Growing up during the Cold War, I remember the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war. In primary school we were taught to 'duck-and-cover' for protection. But even as children hiding under wooden desks, we recognized the inadequacies of this strategy.
Mike Quigley
#39. Labour was always aligned with the U.S. during the Cold War, but the ignominious implosion of communism reinforced the belief that no alternative to the prevailing common sense was possible.
Martin Jacques
#40. Pentagon's readiness and modernization problems are not due to budget cuts. The are the result of habitual modes of conduct evolved during the Cold War and a desire by the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) to protect its comfortable life style in a world that is changing rapidly.
Franklin C. Spinney
#41. Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.
Pankaj Mishra
#42. During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
John Le Carre
#43. The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.
Richard M. Nixon
#44. The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.
Rand Paul
#45. If ... many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.
Margaret Thatcher
#46. And of course, in West Germany, they made every effort that people who came from the East would get jobs and would get a comfortable existence. That was part of the Cold War - and part of the winning side of the Cold War.
Stefan Heym
#47. I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.
Malcolm Gladwell
#48. The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
Fareed Zakaria
#49. The '60s are my favorite decade - with the Cold War, the women's movement. And then there's the music, the fashion, the clothes, the hair.
Margot Robbie
#50. No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.
Robert M. Gates
#51. Russia and China have become two great allies. They'd never be divided as they were during the Cold War Days. Russia and China together cannot be defeated: militarily, economically or morally.
Andre Vltchek
#52. What is the great fear of the United States? That an Eastern power will build a navy to challenge us. How do you keep them from doing that? Keep them at each other's throats so they don't have any money to do this. This is why we fought the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.
George Friedman
#53. I am an armor officer. I grew up as a part of the team that helped to field M-1s and M-60-A3s to the army back in 1980s. It's still a magnificent tank, and we designed it for the Cold War and Central Europe.
Eric Shinseki
#54. After the Cold War ended, there was an agreement between the former Soviet Union and America to convert weapons-grade nuclear materials into reactor-grade materials. So disarmament and nuclear energy actually are strongly linked.
Susan Eisenhower
#55. My feeling is that it's a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.
Robert Dallek
#56. Our Cuba policy didn't make much sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now.
Stephen M. Walt
#57. So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.
Stewart Udall
#58. The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.
Annie Jacobsen
#59. I'm a child of the Cold War. You do not say, "Oh, my God, there are Russian planes, so I'm going to cede the field." I mean, what kind of world would we have had if the United States had done that for 60 years?
Anne-Marie Slaughter
#60. I found it marvelous that the great supporters of America in Europe are, of course, those countries that American consistency and firmness in the Cold War ended up liberating.
John Rhys-Davies
#61. He has held on to certain ideals, like democracy and freedom, that made a deep impression on him - things inherited from the Cold War era,
Evan Osnos
#62. After World War II, American leaders were, in Dean Acheson's words, 'present at the creation' of a global order. Now at the end of the cold war, we desperately need that same vision, that leadership, that creativity to be applied to the governance of the global marketplace.
John J. Sweeney
#63. The cold war was an aberration. Note how quickly the Europeans turned on America once 400 hostile divisions were no longer on their borders.
Bill Vaughan
#64. During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.
Bob Graham
#65. When Mitt Romney talked about Putin expanding his sphere of influence, Obama mocked and said, 'The Cold War has been over 20 years, nothing to be worried about' ... We keep making that mistake with Putin.
Ted Cruz
#66. There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
John Le Carre
#67. The nightmare of the Cold War was nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational person. I don't want to live through that nightmare.
Rudy Giuliani
#68. There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.
Dennis Prager
#69. So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.
Malcolm Wallop
#70. The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#71. During the Cold War era, the issue was the containment of Soviet influence, and we tolerated many an authoritarian regime as long as they were useful to us in this respect.
Zalmay Khalilzad
#72. I give my grandfather, Dr Harold Young, a forestry Professor at the University of Maine, full credit for my career path. He pioneered the use of aerial photography in forestry in the 1950s, and we think he worked as a spy for the CIA during the Cold War, mapping Russian installations.
Sarah Parcak
#73. Young people in college were not even born when the Berlin Wall fell, and so they are not really cognizant of the Cold War and what that meant. Now, truly, the genie is out of the bottle and you have the possibility that terrorists ... could be stealing a bomb or buying a bomb
Valerie Plame
#74. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.
Matt Taibbi
#75. I remember the '80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.
John Cusack
#76. The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.
Tony Blair
#77. Construction of the first gas pipeline system was started during the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and for all those years, from the 1960s until this day, Russia has been fulfilling its contract obligations in a very consistent and reliable way, regardless of the political situation.
Vladimir Putin
#78. The new century has brought on its own terrible dangers, which although not reaching the apocalyptic potential of the Cold War, still have the capacity to shake our world.
Adam Schiff
#79. A drastic reduction in weapons competition following a general release from the commitment to the Cold War would be sharply in conflict with the needs of the industrial system.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#80. What the Cold War did was provide a fairly clearly defined enemy and it's easy to organize around that.
Jeff Sharlet
#81. As they were during the Cold War, urban population centers remain the most likely targets of a nuclear attack. Now, however, an attack may come without warning from an unknown enemy, to achieve unclear motives.
Alan Cranston
#82. With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.
John Doolittle
#83. As General Eisenhower discovered, it is easier to end the Cold War or stamp out poverty than to master this devilish pastime.
James Reston Jr.
#84. Russia never lost the Cold War ... because it never ended.
Vladimir Putin
#85. The CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King.
Annie Jacobsen
#86. The Cold War is over. The world has become much more complicated.
Vladimir Putin
#87. What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.
Robert D. Kaplan
#88. During the Cold War, the U.S. instituted a policy of sending money to governments in poor countries to buy their political loyalty. While studies show that sending aid to foreign governments creates allegiance, it does not lead to economic progress.
Iqbal Quadir
#89. My goal was to show the history of the end of the Cold War through both sides - the U.S. side and the Soviet side. I really felt that especially the Soviet side of the story hadn't been well told because we didn't know.
David E. Hoffman
#90. Putin wants to reestablish Russian greatness, not as the Cold War, but in 19th century empire terms.
William J. Clinton
#91. After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.
Hans Kung
#92. What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#93. Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.
Ben Shapiro
#94. I was trained in Army Intelligence, but spent most of my army career in the infantry. But like many people of my generation, I was very much caught up in the Cold War, and books and movies about espionage.
Nelson DeMille
#95. Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome.
Ian Buruma
#96. Already liberals are trying to rewrite the history of the Cold War to remove Reagan from its core, to make him a doddering B-movie actor who happened to be standing there when the Soviet Union imploded. They have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.
Ann Coulter
#97. America won the Cold War by protecting our strategic resources from the threat of foreign control. We must bring the same attitude to our trade relationship with China.
Jo Ann Emerson
#98. In many places around the world, all over the U.S. and Europe there are active nuclear power plants. And for many years during the Cold War the threat of nuclear war was a permanent fear. There's always the concern that human kind is biting off more than they can chew in harnessing nuclear power.
Oren Peli
#99. Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.
Robert Dallek
#100. Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.
Kit Bond
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