Quotes & Sayings About Brezhnev

Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office. — Jimmy Carter

He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a "big-toothed cretin." In 1980, when we were still in Kabul, the U.S. announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. "Wah wah!" Baba exclaimed with disgust. "Brezhnev is massacring Afghans and all that peanut eater can say is I won't come swim in your pool. — Khaled Hosseini

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say. — Richard M. Nixon

Soviet people are better off materially and richer spiritually. — Leonid Brezhnev

The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly - stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev's place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward. (Yurii Boriev, Staliniad, 1990) — Ryszard Kapuscinski

I shall add that only he who has decided to commit suicide can start a nuclear war in the hope of emerging a victor from it. No matter what the attacker might possess, no matter what method of unleashing nuclear war he chooses, he will not attain his aims. Retribution will inevitably ensue. — Leonid Brezhnev

It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war. — Leonid Brezhnev

We should not pour muck on ourselves. — Leonid I. Brezhnev

We Communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. — Leonid Brezhnev

Of late, attempts have been made in the USA - at a high level and in a rather cynical form - to play the "Chinese card" against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy. — Leonid Brezhnev

One of the surprising things that Brezhnev said when we were in our talks, was - when I proposed that we make these changes in nuclear weaponry, he said, "God will never forgive us if we don't succeed." And, you know, coming from the leader of an atheistic communist country, this surprised everyone. — Jimmy Carter

When the Soviet Union came to be run by a valetudinarian mafioso like Brezhnev, the thing itself had fallen into self-contempt. — Leonid Brezhnev

The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshiped the other genocide, Josef Stalin. It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. — Frederick Forsyth

Leonid Brezhnev did not understand the enormous political importance of the decision to produce and afterwards deploy the SS-20s. — Helmut Schmidt

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, the Soviet state was no longer promising its citizens a utopian Communist future. Under Brezhnev, the state stopped working on a vision of the future and, instead, focussed on the past, — Anonymous

The only law we broke was the Brezhnev doctrine that once a country is in the Soviet bloc it cannot be overthrown. — Jack Kemp

Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country ... the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late. — Leonid Brezhnev

The Russians love Brooke Shields because her eyebrows remind them of Leonid Brezhnev. — Robin Williams

One sits the whole day at the desk and appetite is standing next to me. 'Away with you', I say. But Comrade Appetite does not budge from the spot. — Leonid I. Brezhnev

Communists have always viewed the national question through the prism of the class struggle, believing that its solution has to be subordinated to the interests of the Revolution, to the interests of socialism. That is why Communists and all fighters for socialism believe that the main aspect of the national question is unification of the working people, regardless of their national origin, in the common struggle against every type of oppression, and for a new social system which rules out exploitation of the working people. — Leonid Brezhnev

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver. — Anthony Marra

Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends: The energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the minerals treasure house of Central and Southern Africa. — Leonid Brezhnev

Our militant union with peoples which still have to carry on an armed struggle against the colonialists constitutes an important element of our line in international affairs. — Leonid Brezhnev

I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power. — Henry A. Kissinger

Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed. — Alexander Cockburn

Believe me, after the destruction of Chinese nuclear sites by our missiles, there won't be much time for the Americans to choose between the defense of their Chinese allies and peaceful co-existence with us. — Leonid Brezhnev

The highest peace is the peace between opposites. — Leonid Brezhnev

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss's wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss's wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest's far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn't need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty. — Anthony Marra

Brezhnev wasn't a minus for the history of our country, he was a huge plus, He laid a foundation for the country's economics and agriculture. — Leonid Brezhnev

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. — Daniel Hannan

The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win. — Leonid Brezhnev

If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best. — Carlos Fuentes

We are entirely for the idea that Europe shall be free from nuclear weapons, from medium-range weapons as well as tactical weapons. That would be a real zero option. — Leonid Brezhnev

I'm part of nobody's world except Brezhnev's. — Dan Rather

When external and internal forces hostile to the development of socialism try to turn the development of a given socialist country in the direction of the restoration of the capitalist system, when a threat arises to the cause of socialism in that country ... this is no longer merely a problem for that country's people, but a common problem, the concern of all socialist countries. — Leonid Brezhnev

God will not forgive us if we fail. — Leonid I. Brezhnev

Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with. — P. J. O'Rourke

We bow our heads in respect for those Soviet women who displayed exceptional courage in the severe time of war. Never before but during the days of the war the grandeur of spirit and the invincible will of our Soviet women, their selfless dedication, loyalty and affection to their Homeland, their boundless persistence in work and their heroism on the front manifested themselves with such strength. — Leonid Brezhnev

After listening intently for a few seconds, he turned to me. "North Vietnam?" He shook his head derisively. "Very, very bad." He listened some more, then denounced Brezhnev. — Rob Reid

There is nothing more practical than a good theory. — Leonid Brezhnev

Detente is a readiness to resolve differences and conflicts not by force, not by threats and sabre-rattling, but by peaceful means, at the conference table. — Leonid Brezhnev

I can recall photographs of Comrade Ulbricht being embraced by Comrade Brezhnev, which must have been like putting your arms around Grant's Tomb. — Richard Elman

In retrospect, I can see that President Brezhnev was quite proud of the limited agreement that he had concluded in Vladivostok; and to have a new American president come in and say, "That is not good enough - let's do much more, and do it quite rapidly," took him by surprise. — Jimmy Carter

This is about systemic, institutional corruption, not personality. To ask the Democratic leadership to clean things up would be like asking the old Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev to reform itself. It ain't going to happen. — Newt Gingrich

As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press. — Leonid Brezhnev

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today. — Leonid I. Brezhnev

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before. — Ross Perot

The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. — Vladimir Sorokin

The rout of fascism, in which the Soviet Union played the decisive role, generated a mighty tide of socio-political changes which swept across the globe. — Leonid Brezhnev

We Communists have got to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs ... (soon) we will be in a position to return to a much more aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper-hand ... — Leonid Brezhnev

We stand for the dismantling of foreign military bases. We stand for a reduction of armed forces and armaments in areas where military confrontation is especially dangerous, above all in central Europe. — Leonid Brezhnev

I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev. — Tariq Ali