Yakov Smirnoff Quotes


Related Quotes

Hoover and most Republicans were generally opposed to sanctions and an instrument of foreign policy. 25 years after his presidency, the Republican Party started embracing sanctions as a tool of foreign policy and by the end of the 20th century, Republicans were sanction hawks. This quotation illustrates how American political parties and their philosophies change over time.


Bunch was the undersecretary-general of the United Nations who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation efforts in the Middle East. Archie Roosevelt and his extreme right wing associates thought that anyone who worked in the UN was a communist and had no respect for the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee. In the spirit of Archie Roosevelt’s father, the Theodore Roosevelt made the award to Buche and ignored Archie’s slanderous attack. Surprising to most people who know of President Theodore Roosevelt’s general liberal views, his 4th son was an ultraconservative who founded and joined racist, anti-Semitic, right wing organizations, and to the distress of many in the family and without lent his name to many of the most extreme right wing causes and organizations.


He was very sensitive to the criticism of China’s human rights record. The Chinese leadership was very proud to their accomplishments of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and eliminating hunger and starvation, and many foreigners from developed nations were seemingly inattentive to the remarkable economic success in their focus on human rights shortcomings.


It was interesting that Reagan as a political presidential Republican candidate would criticize the foreign policy of the previous Republican Party. However the policy was created by President Richard Nixon who had but a small reservoir of support after Watergate.


Like many in the 1920s, Dewar saw the Communist Soviet Union as the biggest potential risk to peace. However, although the Russian leaders constantly castigated the West, they did not have a large military, and were for the most part highly anti-war as they saw war as the product of Capitalistic competition and the tool of the aristocracy. They had little military equipment and almost no training or officer corps with which to build any Army. Germany in contrast had the skill, experience, officers, a history of aggression, and huge resentment over what they considered their humiliating WWI defeat and peace terms. They would start WWII, not Russia.


The 1st the CIA ever had. Popov was, in the 1950s, considered the CIA’s most valuable agent. He was motivated by deeply felt anger at Soviet exploitation of Russian peasants, including his family. He was caught and executed by Russian authorities in 1960. The quotation illustrates just how simple was his initial communication for spying.


Yakov Smirnoff
Yakov Smirnoff
  • Born: January 24, 1951
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Comedian

Yakov Naumovich Pokhis, better known as Yakov Smirnoff (Russian: Яков Смирнов; /ˈsmɪərnɒf/), is a Ukrainian-American comedian, actor and writer of Jewish origin. He began his career as a stand-up comedian in Ukraine, then immigrated to the United States in 1977 in order to pursue an American show business career, not yet knowing any English. He reached his biggest success in the mid-to-late 1980s, appearing in several films and the television sitcom vehicle What a Country!. His comic persona was of a naive immigrant from the Soviet Union who was perpetually confused and delighted by life in the United States. His humor combined a mockery of life under communism and of consumerism in the United States, as well as word play caused by misunderstanding of American phrases and culture, all punctuated by the catchphrase, "And I thought, 'What a country!'"