Phil Knight Quotes

If you ask me what is the best good fortune in my life, of course I say that I have seen in my lifespan the Wall coming down, the reunification.

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the 'evil empire' ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not.

I remember when the Berlin Wall fell and suddenly intractable problems get solved.

While the Cold War had us questioning our next-door neighbors, big brands emerged to capture our trust. We became consumers.

Nothing is more false than the notion that the triumph of Communism is inevitable or that the Communists are steadily pushing the free world into a corner.

While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.

For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.

During the course of 1989, more and more East Germans lost their fears of the state's repression and chicanery and went out on the streets. There was no turning back then. It is thanks to their courage the Wall was opened.

I quickly came to realize that in the Middle East, God is God, and in the West, the sponsor is God - or, as I like to say, Tide detergent is God.

In 1959, Moscow gave space to an exhibition of American consumer goods, and my father, also a member of this generation, tasted Pepsi for the first time.

If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.

As so many people seem to have done, I kind of fell in love with Willy Brandt.

I had a history teacher who taught us a lot about the Cold War. You had these examples of countries where the government had tried to manage the economy really intensely, and it ended up being bad for the citizens there. I found myself beginning to lean more right on economic issues.

And just seeing yourself on buses and billboards in even the smallest town of any country in the world, it's overwhelming sometimes and it's amazing and it's unbelievable.

The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.

Advertising, the product of capitalism, can only justify itself on the premise that the market is a force for good.

Everything in our world is branded.

In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.

Long before social media existed, the proto-tweets of advertising had penetrated American popular culture: 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste.' 'Where's the beef?' 'A diamond is forever.' 'Think different.' You'd be hard pressed to find a writer's craft that has more directly influenced the vernacular.

All economically well-off nations have used what has been dubbed 'cheque-book diplomacy,' and China does so, too. Apart from funding government-to-government lending, China has also been able to create global companies and global brands that have contributed to Chinese soft power.

The Berlin Wall fell because the East Germans saw the West had more. The Koreans don't like the Japanese and try to prove to them that they are worth more in the industrial arena.

When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries - that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force - came to an abrupt end.