49 Cold war Quotes

We do not have the right to forget that reactionary imperialism exists and its forces actively operate in the world, that they encourage the arms race and that they try to restore the spirit of the Cold War.

When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.

If Adenauer were here with us in the sauna, we could see for ourselves that Germany is and will remain divided but also that Germany never will rise again.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

It was an axiom of 'containment' that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. 'Neutralism' was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological - and sometimes military - pressure to fall into line.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

She's ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted determined men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet politburo don't have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a super power in only one sense-the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms.

Intelligence reports say he - Castro - is very worried about me. I'm very worried that we can't come up with something to justify his worrying.

The fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this [surrender], but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face - that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand - the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for 'peace at any price' or 'better Red than dead,' or as one commentator put it, he would rather 'live on his knees than die on his feet.' And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin - just in the face of this enemy?

My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of people who were close friends - they crossed the street to avoid us.

I said that wherever these people, meaning the Soviet leadership, confronted us with dangerous hostility anywhere in the world, we should do everything possible to contain it and not let them expand any further. I should have explained that I didn't suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn't think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it.

Kerouac was 'locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle' in 'the gray, chill, militaristic silence, [...] the intellective void [...] the spiritual drabness.

We wondered why we ever thought there was, during the Cold War, any serious danger of Russia conquering the world when they couldn't even deliver the scenery for The Tempest.

As so often in Indo-Pakistani and Hindu-Muslim comparisons, the argument is reminiscent of the inequality between the contenders in the Cold War: you could demonstrate for disarmament in the West, but to demonstrate for this in the East Bloc (except if it were for unilateral disarmament by the Western 'war-mongers') would have put you in trouble.

Fifteen years ago, when the Cold War ended, many of us hoped for a new world order to emerge. A world order rooted in human solidarity - a world order that would be equitable, inclusive and effective. But today we are nowhere near that goal. We may have torn down the walls between East and West, but we have yet to build the bridges between North and South - the rich and the poor.

A good start would be if the nuclear-weapon states reduced the strategic role given to these weapons. More than 15 years after the end of the Cold War, it is incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear-weapon states operate with their arsenals on hair-trigger alert - such that, in the case of a possible launch of a nuclear attack, their leaders could have only 30 minutes to decide whether to retaliate, risking the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes.

Kennedy: We have enough missiles to blow you [USSR] up thirty times over. Khrushchev: We have enough to blow you up only once, but that will be enough for us.

He believed that freedom was a universal value ... that people everywhere wished to be free, and ... the Cold War would end.

A determined opponent of communism ... he played an important role in bringing an end to communism and to the artificial division of Europe imposed after the Second World War. ... this process culminated in the accession of 10 new member-states to the European Union at the beginning of May this year.

At home his vision and leadership restored national self-confidence and brought some significant changes to U.S. politics while abroad the negotiation of arms control agreements in his second term and his statesman-like pursuit of more stable relations with the Soviet Union helped bring about the end of the Cold War.

President Reagan, in his long and fruitful life, was witness to ... facing important challenges, including the end of the Cold War.

Reagan bolstered the U.S. military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal.

Ronald Reagan, in my view, was the greatest of post-World War II American presidents. More than anybody else, he followed the policies that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the final victory of a more free-market approach to the management of economies over the centrally planned approach of the old eastern states ... His greatest legacy will be the end of Soviet communism.

This is an enormously sad day. President Reagan was one of the towering figures of our time, and the man who, with Margaret Thatcher, won the Cold War for the West. ... We, in Great Britain, as in so many other places around the world, owe him an everlasting debt.

During the arduous period of the Cold War, President Reagan showed great leadership and contributed tremendously to the advancement of democracy and free-market economy. In addition, President Reagan always placed a top priority on the maintenance of a sound Japan-U.S. alliance.

President Reagan's leadership served to define an era of sweeping geo-political change ... He helped lay the foundations for the end of the Cold War ... His wit, warmth and unique capacity to communicate helped to make him one of the most influential figures in the second half of the 20th century.

There's no doubt that the United States would be a very different country if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan. It may well be that the Cold War would have been very different if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was a transformational president who made an enormous difference in our lives by leading the West to victory in the Cold War and allowing free people to watch the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

He was a great president who guided the Cold War toward a victory for freedom against communism ... He would use his skillful humor and leadership to steer them to success.

Hungary and Europe do not forget Ronald Reagan's help and his support for the former Communist countries.

He will be missed not only by those who knew him and not only by the nation that he served so proudly and loved so deeply, but also by millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued. Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired. ... a truly great American hero.

Someone helped us a lot with the atomic bomb. The intelligence (service) played a huge role. These Rosenbergs suffered in America. It is not excluded that they helped us. But we shouldn't really speak about it, because we might receive this kind of help in the future.

I recommended that we establish contact with [the Chinese communists]. We had established contact through a military mission there but that we did not ... we should not withdraw recognition from Chiang Kai-shek at that time, but we should recognize the inevitability of the loss, Chiang's loss to Mao, and that therefore we should, establish relations of the type that I described that we had with warlords, with the communists, and that we have, say, a consulate there, so that there was a political contact in addition to the military. That, of course, did not go down.

Going back to Davies, at the time after the war that Davies was a member of the policy staff of the State Department, he had advised (this was under Dulles), that certain actions be taken, certain policies be pursued, which seemed alien to the simon-pure Communist haters.

'[H]e has been a very underestimated man by his opponents. I think that his understanding and handling of our relationship with the Soviet Union was brilliant. Gorbachev himself gives Reagan credit for effectively ending the Cold War. Are there areas where I would disagree with him? Sure. He was opposed to abortion. He did not believe in total laissez-faire capitalism. He did build up our national debt enormously. But I tell you one thing he did that impressed me so much it almost wipes everything else off the mat. It's something I found thrilling beyond words. And that was: he was in Russia, and he gave a speech in the University of Moscow. And the theme of the speech was to explain to the people there what American capitalism is. Here is the president of the United States, in a distinguished university in a country with whom we've had hostile relationships for decades-getting up, and in the most passionate yet totally non-belligerent way, explaining what economic freedom means, what capitalism means. It was so extraordinary in the moral clarity that he brought to his presentation that I'll remember it, with great admiration, forever.'[9]

Having taken advantage of the carelessness of the KGB, the true communist ran to Moscow, with the intention of announcing the Western journalists that communism in Partgrad is being built in a wrong way and to begging the Western leaders to exert pressure on Soviet leadership so that the latter would rectify the Soviet communism and he, a true communist would be taken back in the party.

We cannot, after all, ignore the fact that the cold war is being fostered from the U.S. No one will deny that American bases around our country are not being reduced; in fact they are being strengthened. All of this is bound to cause suspicion, and it is bound to cause the Soviet leaders to be cautious and vigilant.

There are no U.S. flyers in our country. The bodies were handed over to the Americans. We have no other bodies of flyers or living flyers in the Soviet Union. If we had, why should we try to hide them?

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe - and there never will be under a Ford administration... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.

In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no percise idea of what to do with them.

Of late, attempts have been made in the USA-at a high level and in a rather cynical form-to play the 'Chinese card' against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy.