Steve Earle Quotes

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.

I see the collapse of the Soviet Union as a great tragedy of the XX century.

When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.

If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neither of those two things are true and it doesn't take a lot brains to understand this.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

My father was a Party member and he was a pretty high rank military officer under the colonel, junior colonel, I don't know the term. He was a total Stalinist. A bit with a streak of anti-Semitism and very shrewd man, a very kind of nervous man.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

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!

Bolshevism is the other end of Czarism.

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

Nothing to bother about, the man was a Bolshevik.

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

One cannot be a Communist and preserve an iota of one's personal integrity.

We are witnessing the collapse of Bolshevism.

The real strength of the democratic theory in opposition to the fascist or communist is that the fascist frankly states that certain people will tell other people what they shall do to be happy, and those other people have little or nothing to say about it. In theory the communists were to do everything in common, in practice a small group there also tells other people what they shall do to achieve their objectives. So far more nearly than any other form of government, the democratic form has allowed people to shape their own government

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

The USA is a better form of society than the USSR… To reject America as a capitalist country and to treat the Soviet Union as an example of socialist planning is to make nonsense of every one of our ideals.

Stalin is a strong, ruthless revolutionist and therefore a very potential threat to future world conditions.

The only thing the East German system taught us was that we should never do it that way again.

I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.

Nothing is more false than the notion that the triumph of Communism is inevitable or that the Communists are steadily pushing the free world into a corner.

I love 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.

In Soviet Russia, party always finds you!

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.