Sourced and curated.

An evil empire.

1983

★ 7.2

Ich bin ein Berliner.

1963

★ 7.1

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

Winston Churchill

1946

★ 7.0

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.

Nikita Khrushchev

1956

★ 7.0

We have listened to the wisdom in an old Russian maxim. And I'm sure you're familiar with it, Mr. General Secretary…The maxim is…trust, but verify.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.

1987

★ 7.0

Political debate

Gerald Ford

1976

★ 6.9

I have here in my hand a list of 205... A list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

Joseph McCarthy

1950

★ 6.9

Essay · Political literature

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy.

Francis Fukuyama

The End of History? · 1989

★ 6.9

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

1963

★ 6.2

Joseph Welch

1954

★ 5.9

Song · Protest music · Folk music

We will all go together when we go, All suffused with an incandescent glow.

Tom Lehrer

We Will All Go Together When We Go · 1959

★ 5.1

Congressional hearing

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

J. Parnell Thomas

1947

★ 5.0

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.

Harry Truman

1947

★ 4.4

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy · 1961

★ 3.9

McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.

Joseph McCarthy

1952

★ 3.7

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.

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.

1984

★ 3.7

TV program

Edward R. Murrow

1954

★ 3.6

We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth--but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced...I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations...He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.

1962

★ 3.6

We're especially not going to tolerate these attacks from outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.

1985

★ 3.6

The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.

We are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer.

1992 State of the Union Address · 1992

★ 3.6

Speech

Bernard Baruch

1947

★ 3.5

Philosophical literature

We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to "the conquest of nature" and in particular of human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal.

Leo Strauss

1948

★ 3.5

You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

1954

★ 3.5

Essay

Our gadget-filled paradise suspended in a hell of international insecurity.

Reinhold Niebuhr

1957

★ 3.5

We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.

Dean Rusk

1962

★ 3.5

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order-a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.

I consider your crime worse than murder... Who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.

1991

★ 3.5

Irving R. Kaufman

1951

★ 3.4

At present an iron curtain of silence has descended, cutting off the Russian zone from the Western Allies.

T. St. Vincent Troubridge

A Curtain Across Europe · 1945

★ 2.6

Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

First Inaugural Address of Dwight D. Eisenhower · 1953

★ 2.1

To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.

Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy · 1961

★ 2.0

Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

Harry Truman

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

What we are doing in Korea is this: we are trying to prevent a third world war.

Harry Truman

1951

★ 1.9

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.

Richard Nixon

1969

★ 1.9

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn. For in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like the leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

Without the cold war, what's the point of being an American?

Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush · 1989

★ 1.9

Novel

John Updike

1990

★ 1.9

And now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order.

If anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.

1991

★ 1.9

Nikita Khrushchev

1955

★ 1.9