Jane Smiley - I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unne

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

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Citations

Smiley, Jane. "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States." Slate, 4 Nov. 2004.

Related Quotes

New York Times

The Cold War is Over

This editorial marked what most people agreed was the end of the Cold War.

Justin Cronin

I was very much a child of the Cold War.

Kevin J. Anderson

I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

Hideo Kojima

People nowadays don't know about the Cold War and the U.S.'s old rivalry with the U.S.S.R.

Richard Nixon

The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.

George H. W. Bush

The Cold War didn't end. It was won.

Klaus Fuchs

In the post war period I began again to have my doubts about Russian policy.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied, despite the understandable sensitivities that such a conclusion provokes among the tenderhearted in the West and some of the former leaders of the defeated side.

Joe Garcia

The Cold War has ended for America.

Barack Obama

Here in Europe, I think that there are a lot of young people who forget the issues that were at stake during the Cold War.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

I'm a child of the Cold War. You do not say, "Oh, my God, there are Russian planes, so I'm going to cede the field." I mean, what kind of world would we have had if the United States had done that for 60 years?

Justin Cronin

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

Fareed Zakaria

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

Robert Dallek

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

Bob Ainsworth

Stalin's policies pushed the world into the Cold War. Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.

Stacy Keach

Where were they when the Russians went down?

Doris Lessing

Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster…

Paul Tsongas

The cold war is over; Japan won!

In 1992 Russia was in terrible economic shape after the fall of the Soviet Union. Keeping up with the United States military expenditures had bankrupted the Russians. The United States which had strategically increased its defense spending to break the Russian economy if they tried to keep up. However, the U. S. expenditures had forced America into a deficit spending period which produced a national deficit greater than all the previous cumulative deficits in our history. So the American economy was not in great shape either. Meanwhile, Japan, whose constitution (imposed by America after WWII) forbade having a military and funding a military. The result was the Japanese economy was growing at a much more rapid rate, and did not have the unbalanced budget of the United States and Russia. Hence, Tsongas’ observation.