Quotes · Skopia

17 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Soviet Union✕clear

Speech · Political speech

An evil empire.

1983

★ 7.2

Speech · Political speech

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

Political debate

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

1976

★ 6.9

Autobiography and memoir

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

Hope Against Hope · 1970

★ 6.0

Speech · Political speech

In 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.

1983

★ 3.6

Speech · Political speech

The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

2005

★ 3.6

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.

1948

★ 3.5

Autobiography and memoir

The 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

Hope Abandoned · 1972

★ 3.5

Speech · Political speech

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

1940

★ 2.8

Autobiography and memoir

It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

1930

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

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

Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush · 1989

★ 1.9

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.

Nikita Khrushchev

1955

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

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

1987

★ 1.9

Film · Crime (film) · Drama (film) · Crime · Drama

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

Traffic · 2000

★ 1.9

Political literature

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

1947

★ 1.8

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

Observer · 1958

★ 1.8