Jan Hammer Quotes

Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.

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.

When Communist U.S.S.R. was a superpower, the world was better off. The right-wing media is trying to marginalize the peace movement.

In those days the Communists talked like Democrats … We got along well enough until the Nazi-Stalin Pact …. Then my leftist associates started laying off Hitler and started ranting about the “imperialist war.”

I just wanted to see China with my own eyes. I wanted to see whether North Korea was the best country in the world or China was the best. I grew up believing that China was much worse than North Kore, because that's what the regime told us.

Let's take Pravda in the 1980s. I mean you could have read things in Pravda saying that it was a stupid error to invade Afghanistan: "it was a dumb thing to do, we have to get out, it's costing us too much." I mean that U.S. analog of that would be "extreme liberalism," and it has been pretty well studied.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.

As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

My greatest regret at the passing of America-hating strongman Hugo Chavez is that he didn't live long enough to party with Dennis Rodman.

So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.

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.

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy.

Don't you want to know what's real and what's not? I remember when I was a kid, you know, this whole Cold War thing. They had us scared of the Russians. So, it's almost like, what's real and what's not?

For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed.

Most of them are military commanders, country notables and landowners, and educated people. It is inconceivable that such a group should incline to the theory of Communism. But if Western countries persist in applying unjust pressure, they may well throw themselves into Russia’s arms.

Every communist is Moscow’s spy!

Our fear of communism led us to embrace any dictator that joined us in that fear.

If a narrow-minded FBI agent slipped into Aaron McGruder’s Los Angeles penthouse apartment, his eyes would get wide. Just inside the front door is a photograph of Fidel Castro riding into Havana Jan. 1, 1959.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology

There were severe and highly influential critics of the Marshall plan. They called it a ‘boondoggle,’ a ‘waste’ and a ‘giveaway.’ This costly program had to be sustained.