Petra Nemcova Quotes

Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.

The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.

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.

Sasha, aren’t you a good communist? How can you allow so much ideological freedom? Do something!.

We were behind the iron curtain at last.

… 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 most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

I am just sorry my own mother had to live under that regime for most of her life. I was lucky. I got out and, 14 years later, Czechoslovakia became a free country. So I feel anger, even fury, at this bloody system that ruined so many people's lives for no reason whatsoever.

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

I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.

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

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.

The Communist regime didn't consider this to be a shining moment in history and assigned no heroism to it. They classified it as merely an accident.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

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

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.

In Georgia, people had already understood that communism couldn't survive, and I came to the institute in Moscow, and people still believed in it. They were completely different people, and I found it very difficult psychologically.

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.

The way I understand it, the Russians are sort of a combination of evil and incompetence... sort of like the Post Office with tanks.

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

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

Of course, I know everything that happens in Russia. But even at the most dangerous moment or the most negative moment now, it's still 10 times better than what it was in the communist state.

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.

Of course, I grew up in Communist Romania, but I am happy to say that now our country is democratic, and prospering, since the revolution in 1989.