Soviet Quotes

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.

We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

It didn't take long to recognise the shortcomings of the Soviet regime and to see the values of the free world.

I feel that an understanding could be reached with Germany which would result in a lasting peace with Europe and believe that a German victory is preferable to a British and Soviet victory.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

The Soviet Union was an exception, but even there chess players were not rich. Only Fischer changed that.

I did a long concert tour in England and Denmark and Sweden, and I also sang for the Soviet people, one of the finest musical audiences in the world.

It doesn't work the same way everywhere. The Americans are the most gullible, because they don't like to deny co-workers' requests. People in the former Soviet bloc countries are less trusting, perhaps because of their previous experiences with their countries' secret services.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.

When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests.

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.

I got a cable from New York saying that what I'd written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn't make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me.

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.

On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.

It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.

Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.

We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.

One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.

Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone.

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.

I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

Why should the Negroes ever fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited, and where the people can live freely? Never! I can assure you, they will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the peoples' democracies.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.

I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.