Kathryn Bigelow Quotes

As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.

We were behind the iron curtain at last.

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

The way I understand it, the Russians are sort of a combination of evil and incompetence... sort of like the Post Office with tanks.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

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.”

There is no hope for any nation or group that allows itself to be drawn into the orbit of international communism.

Putin has demonstrated his fondness for the Cold War…. Once a KBG agent, always a KGB agent.

… 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.

We face a hostile ideology [Communism]—global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.

I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world's problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.

I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.