#soviet

As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British. ↗

— Mohammed Omar

#before #british #defeat #fire #future

On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold. ↗

— Stephen Cohen

#became #began #both #carry #cold

With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then. ↗

— Ken Follett

#domination #had #hindsight #know #never

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. ↗

— Bob Graham

#cold #cold war #decline #during #gathered

Carter's hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore. ↗

— Walter Russell Mead

#attacks #back #carter #continued #damaging

If the Soviet Union and the United States have not experienced direct military confrontations, on the other hand, they supported, armed and trained Africans, to fight other Africans. ↗

— Omar Bongo

#confrontations #direct #experienced #fight #hand

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot. ↗

— Joseph Brodsky

#cannot #country #enough #i #judge

Textbooks are Soviet propaganda. ↗

— Jerry Falwell

#soviet #textbooks

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