Vladimir Putin Quotes

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

My last words to you, my son and successor, are: Never trust the Russians!

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in.

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.

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

The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.

I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

I would prefer to abandon the terminology of the past. 'Superpower' is something which we used during the cold war time. Why use it now?

We should never send another spy to the Soviet Union. Honesty is all that is necessary.

] The vast industry of mutual surveillance that grew up alongside the industry of mutual destruction is not about to disappear. The spies, like the weapons, are here to stay. And proliferate, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.

True and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.

We won the Cold War because we showed nuclear vigilance and diligence.

I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

I say at this point, for different reasons, Bush and Hussein are both very threatening to world peace and to deny that is to be incredibly naive.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

In terms of the espionage, this is something I have talked to President Obama about. We don't want it to mar the relationship between Mexico and the United States. But it is unacceptable for a country to practice such espionage, especially if there is a good relationship with the other country.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.