Brezhnev Quotes

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today. ~ Leonid I. Brezhnev

I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The only law we broke was the Brezhnev doctrine that once a country is in the Soviet bloc it cannot be overthrown. ~ Jack Kemp

As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Brezhnev did not understand the enormous political importance of the decision to produce and afterwards deploy the SS-20s. ~ Helmut Schmidt

When external and internal forces hostile to the development of socialism try to turn the development of a given socialist country in the direction of the restoration of the capitalist system, when a threat arises to the cause of socialism in that country ... this is no longer merely a problem for that country's people, but a common problem, the concern of all socialist countries. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

Brezhnev wasn't a minus for the history of our country, he was a huge plus, He laid a foundation for the country's economics and agriculture. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

We are entirely for the idea that Europe shall be free from nuclear weapons, from medium-range weapons as well as tactical weapons. That would be a real zero option. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

We should not pour muck on ourselves. ~ Leonid I. Brezhnev

One of the surprising things that Brezhnev said when we were in our talks, was - when I proposed that we make these changes in nuclear weaponry, he said, "God will never forgive us if we don't succeed." And, you know, coming from the leader of an atheistic communist country, this surprised everyone. ~ Jimmy Carter

It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before. ~ Ross Perot

This is about systemic, institutional corruption, not personality. To ask the Democratic leadership to clean things up would be like asking the old Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev to reform itself. It ain't going to happen. ~ Newt Gingrich

It's irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. I've lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you're dead. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

After listening intently for a few seconds, he turned to me. "North Vietnam?" He shook his head derisively. "Very, very bad." He listened some more, then denounced Brezhnev. ~ Rob Reid

God will not forgive us if we fail. ~ Leonid I. Brezhnev

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the empire "empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan's entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin - as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life ~ Anthony Marra

We bow our heads in respect for those Soviet women who displayed exceptional courage in the severe time of war. Never before but during the days of the war the grandeur of spirit and the invincible will of our Soviet women, their selfless dedication, loyalty and affection to their Homeland, their boundless persistence in work and their heroism on the front manifested themselves with such strength. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

I'm part of nobody's world except Brezhnev's. ~ Dan Rather

He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a "big-toothed cretin." In 1980, when we were still in Kabul, the U.S. announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. "Wah wah!" Baba exclaimed with disgust. "Brezhnev is massacring Afghans and all that peanut eater can say is I won't come swim in your pool. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed. ~ Alexander Cockburn

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss's wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss's wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest's far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn't need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty. ~ Anthony Marra

One sits the whole day at the desk and appetite is standing next to me. 'Away with you', I say. But Comrade Appetite does not budge from the spot. ~ Leonid I. Brezhnev

The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshiped the other genocide, Josef Stalin. It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. ~ Frederick Forsyth

Of late, attempts have been made in the USA - at a high level and in a rather cynical form - to play the "Chinese card" against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

We stand for the dismantling of foreign military bases. We stand for a reduction of armed forces and armaments in areas where military confrontation is especially dangerous, above all in central Europe. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

The essence of foreign policy, is deciding which son of a bitch to support -in 1941, Hitler or Stalin; in 1972, Brezhnev or Mao; in 1979, Somoza or Ortega. One has to choose. A blanket anti-son of a bitch policy, like a blanket anti-ethnic cleansing policy, is soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion. ~ Charles Krauthammer

We Communists have got to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs ... (soon) we will be in a position to return to a much more aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper-hand ... ~ Leonid Brezhnev

I can recall photographs of Comrade Ulbricht being embraced by Comrade Brezhnev, which must have been like putting your arms around Grant's Tomb. ~ Richard Elman

The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, the Soviet state was no longer promising its citizens a utopian Communist future. Under Brezhnev, the state stopped working on a vision of the future and, instead, focussed on the past, ~ Anonymous

The highest peace is the peace between opposites. ~ Leonid Brezhnev