Dan Rather Quotes

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world's problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.

I thought that communism, the tyranny of communism, was an abomination and I beseeched God to bring that terrible evil down and he did. It was a great triumph, it took awhile, but it happened.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

I grew up under Communism so we could only learn Russian, and then when Communism fell in 1989 we could learn a few more things and have the freedom to travel and the freedom of speech - and the freedom of dreaming, really.

I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.

I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.

Those of us who lived under communism for most of our lives were looking toward the Western world because of its values, emphasis on democracy, individual liberties and freedom, and economic prosperity.

Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.

Psychology and economics are Stalin's favorable winds. He is also the party 'boss.' But he is, in addition, the Soviet Union's most striking personality.

The difference between eastern Europe and the United States is that the United States still has a Communist party.

Only enemies of the Soviet Union can think of the KGB as some kind of secret police.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

The Bolsheviks called their system socialist so as to exploit the moral prestige of socialism. The West adopted the same usage for the opposite reason: to defame the feared libertarian ideals by associating them with the Bolshevik dungeon

I do not believe that Communism will overwhelm the free world.

There is no hope for any nation or group that allows itself to be drawn into the orbit of international communism.

Russia is now a horrible picture with its revolutionary double nature. It lies there like a huge wreck on the shore, broken up by its revolution.

The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

We face a hostile ideology [Communism]—global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.