Soviet Occupation Quotes

We're dealing with two devils who both want to rule hell. ~ Ruta Sepetys

We do not create happiness without integrating our passion into our work life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If the Russian word " perestroika " has easily entered the international lexicon, this is due to more than just interest in what is going on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring, i.e. progressive development, a fundamental change. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. ~ Susan Abulhawa

Love is the idler's occupation, the warrior's relaxation, and the sovereign's ruination. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy's artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn't accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: "They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, 'You made it, Ivan!' " My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn't understand why they were so cheerful… The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. "Brothers! Friends!" they threw themselves on their comrades. "Halt! Another step and we'll shoot!" The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…"How were you taken prisoner?" the interrogator asked my father. "The Finns pull ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen,
Delightful industry enjoy'd at home,
An Nature, in her cultivated trim
Dress'ed to his taste, inviting him abroad -
Can he want occupation who has these? ~ William Cowper

Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Actual physical repose isn't often the best cure for weariness: it's change of thought and occupation, particularly if the open air is a part of the cure. I've forgotten I have a care in the world. ~ Grace S. Richmond

In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality. ~ Leon Trotsky

Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained to the assumption that the stories I read were literally true, I became aware of a more meaningful truth in the text, a truth intentionally detached from the exigencies of history. Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him. Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost became so much more real to me than the detached, unearthly being I had been introduced to in church. Today, I can confidently say ~ Reza Aslan

We will not have any of these cases in the Soviet Union," said a Soviet delegate confidently. Don Francis couldn't resist saying to Marc Conant in his loudest stage whisper, "And they won't, all right." In a stern Russian accent, Francis continued: "You have AIDS - bang, bang, bang." The Soviets were not amused. ~ Randy Shilts

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism - its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure. ~ Michael Pollan

I was very active. I was always all over the place trying to do a million things, just into this activity. If you asked me when I was 14 what I wanted to be: "Activist, first, is my occupation. I am an activist." ~ Lauryn Hill

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The Soviet Union's propaganda clearly wishes to use public opinion in this country to get the West to reduce its own arms while doing nothing themselves. In this way they would gain nuclear superiority. This is simply not on. ~ James Callaghan

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between 'Communism' and 'capitalism'; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history - and history was thrusting them aside.
Europe's future would look very different - and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten. ~ Tony Judt

And further, I tell you that the Jew is right, when he acts as he does - because we are too timid to be as German as the Jew is Jewish! ... It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When the unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament. ~ Julius Streicher

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model
all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food. ~ Thomas Sowell

It's not the drug that causes the junkie it's the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can't go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can't have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence.

It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by offering free samples and to concentrate their drug to the highest possible dose to provoke the greatest amount of addiction as possible.

Overall it is a completely staggering and completely satanic human calamity. It is the new gulag and in some ways much more brutal than the soviet gulag. In the soviet gulags there was not a huge prison rape problem and in this situation your life could be destroyed through no fault of your own through sometimes, no involvement of your own and the people who end up in the drug culture are walled off and separated as a whole and thrown into this demonic, incredibly dangerous, underworld were the quality of the drugs can't be verified. Were contracts can't be enforced except through breaking peoples kneecaps and the price of drugs would often led them to a life of crime.

People say "well, I became a drug addict and I lost my house, family, and my job and all that." It's not because you became a drug addict but, because t ~ Stefan Molyneux

During the present interval between the feudal age and the coming time, when life and its occupations will be freely thrown open to women as to men, the condition of the female working classes is such that if its sufferings were but made known, emotions of horror and shame would tremble through the whole of society. ~ Harriet Martineau

There is no inherent reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives to one animal function and its consequences. Numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them,---no other occupation for their feelings or activities. ~ Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill

In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. ~ Timothy Snyder

Krylenko: We care not about any other law. There is no law here but Soviet law. When that law comes into conflict with any other law, you must choose which you will obey.
Rutkowski: I will obey the law of God and of my conscience.
Krylenko: Your conscience does not interest me in the least.
Rutkowski: But it is of very great importance to me.
Judge Galkin: ~ Paul Gabel

Indeed, the U.N. is the main Soviet espionage center in this country. ~ Jack Anderson

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. ~ Randall Jarrell

Sometimes I do readings and people can't stop laughing, but I'm reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It's despair - just keep laughing, until you are dead. ~ Alina Bronsky

The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh. ~ Arthur Miller

Every time I enter a country and have to write down my occupation at customs, I'm like, 'I don't know ... Author? Host? Writer? Stand-up?' I usually write 'author' - that's the safest bet. ~ Chelsea Handler

During my many years in international business and public life, I have had the good fortune of sitting down for lunch with people with whom I completely disagreed, in practice and principle: Soviet communists, heads of state from various unsavory regimes, benighted religious figures, corrupt business leaders. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union. ~ Joseph Stalin

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass. ~ William Congreve

It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don't have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel's response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you. ~ Rachel Corrie

When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow! ~ Yuri Gagarin

There is a law in the Archipelago that those who have been treated the most harshly and who have withstood the most bravely, who are the most honest, the most courageous, the most unbending, never again come out into the world. They are never again shown to the world because they will tell tales that the human mind can barely accept. Some of your returned POW's told you that they were tortured. This means that those who have remained were tortured ever more, but did not yield an inch. These are your best people. These are your foremost heroes, who, in a solitary combat, have stood the test. And today, unfortunately, they cannot take courage from our applause. They can't hear it from their solitary cells where they may either die or remain for thirty years like Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who was seized in 1945 in the Soviet Union. He has been imprisoned for thirty years and they will not give him up. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed
socialism doesn't work, ~ Rand Paul

The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large. ~ Milton Friedman

Lying is a full time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you're stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the midst of seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The more actual the lie becomes to the listener, the more actual it becomes to the teller, which is scariest of all. Some people really get to believing their own lies. ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Tolstoi explains somewhere in his writings why, in his opinion, "Science for Science's sake" is an absurd conception. We cannot know all the facts since they are infinite in number. We must make a selection ... guided by utility ... Have we not some better occupation than counting the number of lady-birds in existence on this planet? ~ Henri Poincare

Idleness and lack of occupation tend - nay are dragged - towards evil ... ~ Hippocrates

I was proud of my Soviet country, of wearing Young Pioneer uniform, bombarded by my mother's Communist propaganda. ~ Roustam Tariko