#soviet

Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#both #deliberately #his #invite #kept

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#case #different #emotions #first #first world

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics. ↗

— Andrzej Wajda

#collapse #culture #economy #expected #full

It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#britain #british-empire #cold-war #conservative-party-uk #crisis

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#communism #dflp #dogmatism #edward-said #humanism

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown. ↗

— Dalai Lama

#difficult #eastern #european #european countries #example

Membership of the United Nations gives every member the right to make a fool of himself, and that is a right of which the Soviet Union in this case has taken full advantage. ↗

— Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

#case #every #fool #full #gives

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party. ↗

— Ronald Reagan

#because #come #everybody #existence #into

I got a cable from New York saying that what I'd written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn't make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me. ↗

— Harrison Salisbury

#agricultural #because #cable #censors #confirm

In the 1980s America reacted to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. We supported a war that left a nation torn to pieces. And as the last Soviet tank left the country, so did we. ↗

— Simon Sinek

#america #country #did #invasion #last