Vladimir Putin Quotes

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

I know there is no present evidence, and I think there is no present likelihood that the Cubans and the Cuban Government and the Soviet Government would in combination attempt to install major offensive capability.

Cuba does not have nuclear rockets but it does have moral rockets.

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.

Nixon tried to wrap the Soviet Union into a web of agreements that would constrain its behavior. What happened is that many people lost faith in that approach, not the least because of how the Soviets handled it.

Of course, in no case would we allow the creation of a regional union in the Balkans, directed against the Soviet Union and Bulgaria.

Soviet Union foreign policy is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and the key is Russian nationalism.

Communism counts its opportunities in terms of decades - not of weeks. Its means of aggression consist not only of nuclear weapons and missiles with enormous boosters, and not only of spies, agents and terrorists, but of great masses of men and women, deluded by a common ideology which inspires them with a false hope.

In 1956, I received an invitation to a dedication of an observatory in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Armenia, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

The Cold War has ended for America.

The way that Soviet intelligence tried to reshape the balance of power in the Middle East is essential to understand the developments that led to the outbreak of the Six-Day War.

Just because the boogeyman of the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, it doesn't mean the world is living angelically.

Believe me, most of the people in Russia are seeing the West as a threat.

We created NATO. It was a United States invention for the collective security of Europe. It has been a Russian desire since 1947 to break up NATO.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

Russia is basically Italy with nuclear weapons.

Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.

Russia is an interesting place because they're extremely evil but they're not that good at implementing their evil.

If we look decades ago, we know that NATO allies contributed a lot of equipment close to the border of the Soviet Union.

When great powers fade, as they inevitably must, it's normally for one of two reasons. Some powers exhaust themselves through overreach abroad, underinvestment at home, or a mixture of the two. This was the case for the Soviet Union. Other powers lose their privileged position with the emergence of new, stronger powers.

If there's Cold War, no 'Star Wars' in China.

Back in 1956, we signed a treaty and surprisingly it was ratified both by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and the Japanese Parliament. But then Japan refused to implement it and after that the Soviet Union also, so to say, nullified all the agreements reached within the framework of the treaty.

With respect to the situation in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, in both countries the Soviet Union had been working hard to create an infrastructure of those who shared their point of view and were prepared to take over the countries.

Detente - isn't that what a farmer has with his turkey - until Thanksgiving?

Think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.