Angela Merkel Quotes

Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.

Was the Soviet Union reformable? I would say no. They said, 'Okay, the Soviet Union isn't working.' They would say, 'No, it's great. We just need democracy, political pluralism, private property.' And then there was no Soviet Union. The European Union is the same.

When the USSR collapsed, I was 11, and unlike many people, I don't miss it.

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.

I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.

If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.

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

Of course, I know everything that happens in Russia. But even at the most dangerous moment or the most negative moment now, it's still 10 times better than what it was in the communist state.

The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

We are witnessing the collapse of Bolshevism.

I was very anti-Soviet and very pro-Russian..

For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.

In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

I remember my time growing up. It was a little bit difficult because the Soviet Union was broken.

I remember the Soviet Union and when the Iron Curtain fell down in 1991. I was just 20 years old, and everybody had a dream to live in a modern democratic society, in a modern country. More than 15 years passed, and nothing changed. There's a saying I like very much: if you want a thing done well, do it by yourself.

I didn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.

Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they would want it back.

The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn't funny anymore.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

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

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.