Browsing Topic Best Cold War Quotes

Here in Europe, I think that there are a lot of young people who forget the issues that were at stake during the Cold War.

You’ve got to remember the Cold War was a very real thing then, so the relationship with the United States was very, very important. As was the relationship that I was developing with China: that was something I did very much. And they weren’t conflicting things.

The Cold War has been over for a long time. I’m not interested in having battles that, frankly, started before I was born.

The task of saving the earth’s environment must and will become the central organizing principle of the post-Cold War world.

You know, it’s very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev – beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam.

The cold war was an aberration. Note how quickly the Europeans turned on America once 400 hostile divisions were no longer on their borders.

To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.

I started out as a Cold Warrior, even my last years in grade school.

Who knows better than you what it means to have a commander-in-chief who lived his entire life, who lived throughout the entire Cold War, and doesn’t know what the nuclear triad is? It’s absolutely astonishing. And so it’s terrific to have Joe Dunford and you know, perhaps John Bolton and other people in positions of trust.

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.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

The probability of a fatal nuclear detonation is greater now than at any time during the Cold War. As the Russian military deteriorates, and as rogue governments and terrorists seek to acquire nuclear capabilities, the threat continues to grow.

I would rather have the United States as the world’s policeman than the Soviet Union as the world’s jailer.

In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.

I came up during the cold war, and during the cold war it was always possible with the then Soviet Union – the Russian leaders behaved carefully and predictably. They didn’t engage in nuclear saber rattling. They were able to work with us and align their interests where possible.

The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

When WWII ended, the Cold War started, and the interest of the Western world was not to completely break Germany. So all those Nazis who had been controlling the country now had the power to rebuild it. I think there were many of them who just continued their life in society; it’s a very known fact.

Reagan took an approach to the Cold War dramatically different from any other US President. To wit, he thought we should win. This was a fresh concept. At the time, it was widely ridiculed as a dangerous alteration of US policy. Only after it worked was Reagan’s dangerous foreign policy recast as merely a continuation of the policies of his predecessors.

You have won the Cold War. … [Your] underappreciated valor [helped] topple the Berlin Wall, and bring down dictators the world over. … For the past four decades the world behind the Iron Curtain … looked to Americans for hope, and America looked to you to get the job done. Today, the free world says thank you.

Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let’s remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

The Cold War may be ‘over’ for the West. For the Soviets it has entered a new, active and promising phase.

The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.

The threat of mutually assured destruction worked for the United States during the Cold War because it had proved its willingness to drop nuclear bombs on enemy cities at the end of World War II. It might work less well for Israel, because the Israeli Air Force has never deliberately targeted a large civilian population center, and its leaders have said its morality would not permit it do so.

The world has always been a dangerous place. Now it is dangerous in a different way, because the world order that we’ve known since the end of the Cold War has been radically transformed. All of the institutions that preserved peace and promoted global trade will be weaker – NATO, the EU, NAFTA – and US relationships with other countries will change, too.

The relationship between the Chinese government and me is like a Cold War.

Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe.

I am more than ever convinced that communism is on the march on a worldwide scale which only America can stop.

Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.

The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world.

For my generation, coming of age at the height of the Cold War, fear of nuclear winter seemed the leading existential threat on the horizon. But the danger posed by war to all humanity-and to our planet-is at least matched by climate change.

We in the west walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the cold war and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again there will be consequences.

To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists. The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers.