Krzysztof Penderecki 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.

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

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

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.

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

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

… the inhuman communist police state tyranny

Russia is enveloped with communism -- a new religious freedom must come. God will overrule it, for that people must hear the truth, and truth in simplicity.

The Russian Leadership Came to the conclusian that Western Expansion could only be reversed with an "iron fist".

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.

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.

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.

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

I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.

This bill reminds me of the tactics of the former Soviet Union - and we know how successful that was.

I was born under Communism. I know what it's like to live in a system where you can't speak, you have to whisper. Where the state is so pervasive and so intrusive.

From our perspective now, there is a not a huge understanding about the totalitarian Communism that Soviet Russia practiced during the 1950s - it was an atrocious system.

The workers love Khrushchev very much. He hasn't got an enemy in the entire country. Quite a few under it.

People in Tel Aviv can not imagine, but in 1990, here in Leipzig or Dresden, whoever wanted to buy a car had to wait 14 years. The East Germans worked like people in the West, but the fruits of their labor were harvested by a criminal regime.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

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

Stalin is a shameful stain on our country's history.

There was a joke in Czechoslovakia: The Communist Party dance, it's one step forward, two steps backward, and everyone is still clapping.

It seems that probably Putin's father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

I sometimes joke - but the joke is not so wrong - that after my time in East Germany, I could either afford therapy to work through what happened under the Communists or move to New York.