Wendy Kopp Quotes

Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America - historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

The United States is as weak as the Soviet Union. If enough pressure is applied to them, they will pull out of the Middle East.

It was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology. And so it was against that backdrop that the early space flights took off.

I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.

Why should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

Throughout history, when societies have been faced with big challenges, they've put their best people on them. During the Space Race, American and Russian scientists, engineers, astronauts and cosmonauts pushed the bounds of what was possible and landed men on the moon.

We didn't go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we're Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

You yourself said to Khrushchev?, "You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we're ahead of you in color television. I think that color television is not as important as rocket thrust.

The overall or political objective is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.

Adlai the appeaser ... who got a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.

My last words to you, my son and successor, are: Never trust the Russians!

But we cannot expect the Soviet Union to show restraint in the face of United States weakness or irresolution. As long as I am president, we will not permit detente to become a license to fish in troubled waters. Detente must be, and I trust will be, a two-way street.

The Cold War didn't end. It was won.

When I came to Congress in 1993, the traditional idea that all politics stopped at the water's edge was alive and well. Americans had been unified for the previous four decades against the threat from the former Soviet Union and communism.

In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

During his last 18 months in office, Eisenhower flew to Asia, Europe, and Latin America and deployed his war hero's popularity to seek new friends for America while trying to improve relations with Moscow. By the time Ike left office, most Americans had forgotten their anger over losing the space race to the Soviets.

Following the missile crisis, detente started to gain ground between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the international political climate improved after that.

There was obviously never any help from the Russians. I don't even know what the Russians would have done.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.

There was no race - but to the extent that there was an arms competition, it was almost entirely on the Soviet side, first to catch up and then to surpass the Americans.