The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Nadezhda Mandelstam2 quotes
I decided it is better to scream. This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man's way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity. — Nadezhda Mandelstam · 1970The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you. — Nadezhda Mandelstam · 1972Nikita Khrushchev2 quotes
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you. — Nikita Khrushchev · 1956If 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. — Nikita Khrushchev · 1955Ronald Reagan2 quotes
An evil empire. — Ronald Reagan · 1983In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire. — Ronald Reagan · 1983Franklin D. Roosevelt1 quote
The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. — Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1940General Ralph Landry1 quote
You know, when Khruschev was forced out, he sat down and he wrote two letters and gave them to his successor. He said, "When you get yourself into a situation you can't get out of, open the first letter, and you'll be safe. When you get yourself into another situation you can't get out of, open the second letter." Well, soon enough, this guy found himself in a tight place so you open the first letter which says blame everything on me. So he blamed the old man, it worked like a charm. When he got himself into a second situation he couldn't get out of, he opened the second letter. It said, "Sit down, and write two letters." — General Ralph Landry · 2000George F. Kennan1 quote
The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. — George F. Kennan · 1947George H.W. Bush1 quote
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. — George H.W. Bush · 1989Gerald Ford1 quote
There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration. — Gerald Ford · 1976J. William Fulbright1 quote
The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace, not so much because of what it has done, but because of the excuses it has provided us for our failures. — J. William Fulbright · 1958Leo Strauss1 quote
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 · 1948Leon Trotsky1 quote
It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position. — Leon Trotsky · 1930Mikhail Gorbachev1 quote
The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable. — Mikhail Gorbachev · 1987Vladimir Putin1 quote
The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. — Vladimir Putin · 2005Winston Churchill1 quote
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. — Winston Churchill · 1946