Nikita Khrushchev Quotes

If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf.

They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won. Mankind won.

If you feed the people just with revolutionary slogans they will listen today, they will listen tomorrow, they will listen the day after tomorrow, but on the fourth day they will say, "To hell with you."

Even now we feel that Stalin was devoted to Communism, he was a Marxist, this cannot and should not be denied.

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think. Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.

The Americans have surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they will learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointed at you; we'd be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

What innocence, may I ask, is being played here when it is known that this virtuous damsel has already got a dozen illegitimate children?

I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

They pay little attention to what we say and prefer to read tea leaves.

When it comes to combating imperialism we are all Stalinists.

When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some skin on to heal, so that you can skin them again.

We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.

When I was young, I worked for a capitalist twelve hours a day and I was always tired. Now I work for myself twenty hours a day and I never get tired

Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes.

You do not know, you cannot know, the difficulty of the life of a politician. It means every minute of the day or night, every ounce of your energy. There is no rest, no relaxation. Enjoyment? A politician does not know the meaning of the word.

The United States will eventually fly the Communist red flag ... The American people will hoist it themselves.

Bombs do not choose. They will hit everything.

America has been in existence for 150 years and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite 42 years and in another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.

Revolutions are not made for export.

The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.

Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man.

The press is our chief ideological weapon.

If you start throwing hedgehogs under me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.

But life is a great school. It thrashes and bangs and teaches you.

I know what I say at times is not very diplomatic.

The construction of a communist society would be completed 'in the main' by 1980

He who cannot eat horsemeat need not do so. Let him eat pork. But he who cannot eat pork, let him eat horsemeat. It's simply a question of taste.

He was a crystal of morality among our scientists.

The living will envy the dead.

The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small.

Whether you like it or not. history is on our side. We will bury you!

I want to talk to these people because they stay in power and you change all the time.

The survivors (of a nuclear war) would envy the dead.

Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all

Once you pledge, don't hedge.

All the sparrows on the rooftops are crying about the fact that the most imperialist nation that is supporting the colonial regime in the colonies is the United States of America.

The thought sometimes
the unpleasant thought sometimes creeps up on me here as to whether perhaps Khrushchev was not invited here to enable you to sort of rub him in your sauce and to show the might and the strength of the United States so as to make him sort of ... so as to make him shaky at the knees. If that is so, then if I came
if it took me about 12 hours to get here, I guess it'll just
it'll take no more than about 10½ hours to fly back.

Of all cities in the United States I have seen, San Francisco is the most beautiful.

I am not afraid of the devil, and you are just a man.

What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying.

If Adenauer were here with us in the sauna, we could see for ourselves that Germany is and will remain divided but also that Germany never will rise again.

Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.

Mr. President, call the toady of American imperialism to order.

No one is born a Communist ... in the Soviet Union farmers keep on looking in the barn for their horses even after they have given them to the collective.

President Roosevelt proved that a President could serve for life. Truman proved that anyone could be elected. Eisenhower proved that your country can be run without a President.

If you live among dogs, keep a stick. After all, this is what a hound has teeth for-to bite when he feels like it!

In the future, if nuclear weapons are unleashed there will be no front and no rear.

If we were to promise people nothing better than only revolution, they would scratch their heads and say: 'Is it not better to have good goulash?'

The John Birch Society is Communism's greatest ally. With its help we will divide and confuse the American people until they have lost faith in their Government, their nation has ceased to be a major world power, and their country is ripe for revolution.

One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party

When all the world is socialist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything.

They say that the Soviet delegates smile. That smile is genuine. It is not artificial. We wish to live in peace, tranquility. But if anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself poorly. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.

Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.

The one who loses his head no longer cares about his hair.

I don't understand the music but I certainly understand the girl singer!

You must never believe all these things which the scientists say because they always want more than they can get-they are never satisfied.

In a fight you don't stop to choose your cudgels.

Any fool can start a war, and once he's done so, even the wisest of men are helpless to stop it - especially if it's a nuclear war.

I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.

You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept communism outright, but we'll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you'll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won't have to fight you. We'll so weaken your economy until you'll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.

Just imagine: I, a Premier, a Soviet representative, when I came here to this city, I was given a plan - a program of what I was to be shown and whom I was to meet here. But just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked, 'Why not?' What is it, do you have rocket-launching pads there? I do not know

We say the name of God, but that is only habit.