Ben Katchor Quotes

When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.

The Russians are like us, they look and act like us. They are fine people. They got along with our soldiers in Berlin very well. As far as I am concerned, they can have whatever they want just so they don't try to impose their system on others..

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

The English are very exotic to me.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

Shortly afterwards my father told me that he might be going into the Eastern Zone of Germany. At that time my own mind was closer to his than it had ever been before, because he also believed that they are at least trying to build a new world.

The Sandinistas are a tough bunch of guys, with a fabulous amount of Soviet Bloc equipment and Soviet Bloc advisers.

In Georgia, people had already understood that communism couldn't survive, and I came to the institute in Moscow, and people still believed in it. They were completely different people, and I found it very difficult psychologically.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

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 Soviet Union represents a threat in terms of might. It is a joke in terms of its economy and what it has to offer the Third World - a laughingstock to countries that are looking for an economic-development model.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

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

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!

I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.

If you're so committed to liberty that you see the Soviet Union as a threat, you're a Republican. If you're kind of indifferent to freedom and the level of the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union is just a question of extent and not really threatening to anybody, then you're a Democrat.

When Communist U.S.S.R. was a superpower, the world was better off. The right-wing media is trying to marginalize the peace movement.

Labour was always aligned with the U.S. during the Cold War, but the ignominious implosion of communism reinforced the belief that no alternative to the prevailing common sense was possible.

Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.

Chamberlain and Halifax were more afraid of the spread of Communism than they were of Hitler or Mussolini.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

[Communism] is the 20th century's most extraordinary political aberration.

I do not believe that Communism will overwhelm the free world.

We are witnessing the collapse of Bolshevism.

Russia is enveloped with communism -- a new religious freedom must come. God will overrule it, for that people must hear the truth, and truth in simplicity.