East-West Divide Quotes

I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam.

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

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-'90s.

There are many people in the world who really don't understand-or say they don't-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

As a 7-year-old child, I saw the Wall being erected. No one - although it was a stark violation of international law - believed at the time that one ought to intervene militarily in order to protect citizens of the GDR and whole Eastern bloc, of the consequences of that - namely, to live in lack of freedom for many, many years.

In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends.

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

Russia is a part of the West and at the same time is a part of the Asia-Pacific.

The thing is, I grew up in L.A., so I had this unique opportunity to live in both communist Russia and see that life, and then move to America as a young girl and experience a completely different life.

There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.

While the Soviet Union has imposed its rule on its neighbours and drawn an iron curtain between east and west, we in Great Britain have given freedom and independence to more than forty-eight countries whose populations now number more than a thousand million - a quarter of the world's total.

Although the war is over, we are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer.

The people in East Germany have lived through so many changes in the last 15 years like never before in the country, and they did this often with great enthusiasm. But in the West we also have a high degree of transformations.

The problem is not so much that they are Communists as it is that they are Russians.

The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.

The Berlin Wall go down, that was the most wonderful thing that could happen, absolutely. I celebrated with everybody in Berlin that day when the Wall was down.

The British government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilization, which is the kingdom of God.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

Oriental reality is called ideology in Europe and America, and Western ideology is called reality in the Orient. Those viewpoints eat into people's souls and form two distinct kinds of beings.

I don't live in the Cold War. Some people maybe still live in the Cold War, but this is their problem, not mine.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, we played behind the Iron Curtain and sang, 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and I thought, 'We're all going to die. The man is going to get us all killed.' But then you saw all these kids with the American flag and German flags together and singing the song, and it was, wow, like 'We Shall Overcome.'

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S.

The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians' mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.