Patricia Highsmith Quotes

It was very hard to get any records, so the only source for us to really hear what was happening was listening to the Voice of America. We would be taping all the broadcast and then sharing the tapes and talking about it.

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.

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.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust.

The Communist regime didn't consider this to be a shining moment in history and assigned no heroism to it. They classified it as merely an accident.

So you had to rev your engines, to beat the Russians and I think more than anything, if the Soviet team would win, or the Soviet athletes would win, you would see and hear and read about that. Quite frequently. So they would make a big issue of it.

I learned later, just as a footnote, that the World Assembly of Youth was a CIA front.

Furthermore, it is not distorting history to say that it was largely through the efforts and propaganda of our International Federation that the government of the U.S.S.R. was recognized by the majority of the great powers.

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.

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.

Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.

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

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

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.

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.

During the Cold War, the non-aligned movement tried to become a 'third force' in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.

Ralph Bunch is a well known communist who has been sent to corrupt the Secretariat of the United Nations.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda…in their name—calling assault on the West the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people…

We will not sit at the same table with the communists. I will never talk to them

I don’t know what is happening in Vietnam because the only news sources I have are North Vietnamese. But whatever the position of my government is, I believe in it, I support it, and I will support it as long as I live.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing.