Robert Kennedy Quotes

There is an iron curtain across Europe.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

As a 7-year-old child, I saw the Wall being erected. No one - although it was a stark violation of international law - believed at the time that one ought to intervene militarily in order to protect citizens of the GDR and whole Eastern bloc, of the consequences of that - namely, to live in lack of freedom for many, many years.

If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed.

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.

It's a different outlook, and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact, when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall, when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries, for them, the West represents hope.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

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.

More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close.

There are many people in the world who really don't understand-or say they don't-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

I wouldn’t worry if there were a few casualties or a few martyrs behind the iron curtain…. You have got to have a few martyrs. Some people have to get killed.

… 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.

The only thing the East German system taught us was that we should never do it that way again.

Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.

Berlin has a uniquely haunting nature, symbolic of a problematic system that was created to oppress and divide a nation.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, we played behind the Iron Curtain and sang, 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and I thought, 'We're all going to die. The man is going to get us all killed.' But then you saw all these kids with the American flag and German flags together and singing the song, and it was, wow, like 'We Shall Overcome.'

I grew up with communism, and if you live through communism you don't love it.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.

There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.

An iron curtain has descended over Europe.

With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.

The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians' mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is very much a sequel, a continuation of the story about Eastern Europe emerging from war and Communism. The notion of presenting history as a story also appealed to me very much, since that is the way I look at the events I cover as a reporter.

The saddest country I went to was Romania, years ago, during Ceausescu's rule.