John le Carre Quotes

The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.

With grace and a keen appreciation of human nature, Nicholas Thompson has written a revealing, moving history of the Cold War through two fascinating men.

The Cold War was a war, and we won it.

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

The Cold War has been over for a long time. I'm not interested in having battles that, frankly, started before I was born.

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.

The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire.

The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.

Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements…

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…

It's not Mao Tse-tung who threatens southeast Asia, nor is it Ho Chi Minh. If all of Indochina becomes communist, we can thank America, its mistakes, blunders, crimes and imperialism which protects or launches invariably corrupt, dictatorial and unpopular regimes simply because they are anti-communist.

[2015] it's a time that there's a clash of ideologies, similar to the Cold War. I think that a story like this has been waiting to be told, and I think it's a fresh look at the whole earth-shattering business of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You've got to remember the Cold War was a very real thing then, so the relationship with the United States was very, very important. As was the relationship that I was developing with China: that was something I did very much. And they weren't conflicting things.

I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.

It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.

I'm a child of the Cold War. You do not say, "Oh, my God, there are Russian planes, so I'm going to cede the field." I mean, what kind of world would we have had if the United States had done that for 60 years?

We are living in a new ice age, and we need to apply the recipes of the Cold War to the Kremlin. That means isolation instead of offers of negotiation. And Ukraine should have been supplied with weapons long ago.

The United States is using its war on drugs as an excuse to expand its control over Latin America.

In crude Marxist terms, liberals have a theory of infallible government that is constantly at war with the reality of life.

Stability means you do what we say, and what we say is that Colombia and the resources of the Andean region shall be freely available to the rich and powerful of the world, particularly US-based multinational corporations.

In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.

Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives. I have hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb. But when history says that my term of office saw the begining of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it.

In the American political lexicon, 'change' always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.