Quotes on Cold War

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

If... many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.

There is the solution which I respectfully offer to you in this Address to which I have given the title "The Sinews of Peace."

...the high roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come.

Hope is no basis for a defense policy.

I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.

We've spent half the expenditures, we've wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind them, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us.

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers.

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

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

If we let Korea down, the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness....Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?

No one has done more to prevent conflict - no one has made a greater sacrifice for the cause for Peace - than you, America's proud missile submarine family. You stand tall among our heroes of the Cold War.

A world without nuclear weapons may be a dream but you cannot base a sure defence on dreams. Without far greater trust and confidence between East and West than exists at present, a world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.

Berlin is the testicles of the West, every time I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.

A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.