Andrew Grove Quotes

Were it not for Khrushchev’s execution of Stalin we wouldn’t have come to such a sorry state. Since then, we have lived increasingly useless and dirtier lives; this murder of Stalin was also the murder of his people. The country, deprived of high ideals in just a few decades, has run into the ground.

From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.

I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.

Very early, it became clear to me that East Germany could not function.

For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.

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 always used the free room that the G.D.R. allowed me... There was no shadow over my childhood.

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

I never felt the GDR was my home country.

In school, I always sang in choirs. In fact, I used to do a lot of musicals in the youth theatre that I was a member of between the ages of 16 and 18.

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.

When I was 11 years old, I wanted to sing Tosca.

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

Kadar died as a mass killer, and the Hungarian nation can't forget that.

I sang when I was in primary school, and I did singing at Sylvia Young: no acting at all.

I have so much respect for the big opera singers that I never dare to say I'm a singer.

Then I trained as an opera singer for four years before I started singing professionally as a pop act.

Both my mother and my grandmother aspired to be opera singers. And they studied it.