Soviets Quotes

“What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.”

“In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society nor government is very fond of writers. The two are completely opposite approaches toward literature.”

“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.”

“Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.”

“All Nazi champions insist again and again that Marxism and Bolshevism are the quintessence of the Jewish mind, and that it is the great historic mission of Nazism to root out this pest. It is true that this attitude did not prevent the German nationalists either from coöperating with the German communists in undermining the Weimar Republic, or from training their black guards in Russian artillery and aviation camps in the years 1923–1933, or— in the period from August, 1939, until June, 1941—from entering into a close political and military complicity with Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, public opinion supports the view that Nazism and Bolshevism are philosophies—Weltanschauungen—implacably opposed to each other.”

“Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.”

“Americans think Soviets are so grim. I want them to see that they can smile.”

“And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.”

“If wars create vast sums of money for the global elite, is it possible the Soviets, the Viet Cong and Muslim extremists were, or are, also fabricated enemies of the West along with North Korea? Or at least exaggerated threats?”