Gerald R. Ford Quotes

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

People nowadays don't know about the Cold War and the U.S.'s old rivalry with the U.S.S.R.

The Cold War is Over

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

Containment

There is an iron curtain across Europe.

Russia is now a lonely fraction of what the old Warsaw pact was. It not only has lost its old Eastern European allies; those allies are now arrayed on the other side, as members of NATO

Ronald Reagan thundered against Soviet perfidy for the television cameras … the substantive measures he took against the Soviets were remarkably modest.

Buy the Grace of God, America won the Cold War. The Cold War didn't end--It was won.

For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.

It's a different outlook, and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact, when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall, when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries, for them, the West represents hope.

The Iron Curtain may be a thing of the past, but Mother Russia is as mysterious as ever.

Where were they when the Russians went down?

We do not stand equally distant from the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union … American troops are in West Germany in order that free trade unions exist and Soviet troops are in Poland to see to it that free trade unions there do not exist. That is the difference.

Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster…

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does notconcede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.

I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is very much a sequel, a continuation of the story about Eastern Europe emerging from war and Communism. The notion of presenting history as a story also appealed to me very much, since that is the way I look at the events I cover as a reporter.

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!

There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.