“In repentance lies our hope. . . . Were we Americans to repent of the self-righteousness . . . we would realize that if we are not yet one with the Soviets in love, at least we are one with them in sin. . . . Were we to repent of our selfrighteousness, the existence of Soviet missiles would remind us of nothing so much as our own. Soviet threats to rebellious Poles would call to mind American threats to the Sandinistas. Afghanistan would suggest Vietnam. Soviet repression of civil liberties at home would remind us of our own complicity in the repression of these same civil rights abroad. . . . Jesus would never be ‘soft on communism’ anymore than He would be soft on capitalism.”
- William Sloane Coffin , 1985.
“He was the first man I had ever met whom I thought not just handsome but beautiful. With his curly, reddish beard, he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday school print of Jesus. . . . In Che, one felt a desire to heal and pity for suffering. . . . It was out of love, like the perfect knight of medieval romance, that he had set out to combat with the powers of the world. . . . In a sense he was, like some early saint, taking refuge in the desert. Only there could the purity of the faith be safeguarded.”
- I.F. Stone
“[Mikhail Gorbachev is a] visionary . . . simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther, the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade is a global navigator.”
- Lance Morrow , 1990.
“The Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis.”
- Seweryn Bialer , 1981.
“We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor [the Soviet Union] humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“A new consensus is emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in the Great Debate of the past forty years were right all along.”
- Strobe Talbot
“So Fidel Castro, I announce to the City of New York that you gave all of us who are alone in this country . . . some sense that there were heroes in the world. One felt life in one’s overargued blood as one picked up in our newspapees the details of your voyage. . . . It was as if the ghost of Cortez had appeared in our century riding Zapata’s white horse. You were the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second War. . . . [Y]ou are the answer to the argument of commissars and statesmen that revolutions cannot last, that they turn corrupt or eat their own.”
- Norman Mailer , 1958.
“Communism is fine with me. It’s part of the fabric of life on this planet.”
- Ted Turner , 1986.
“We operate here [in the Ford Foundation] under directives which emanate from the White House. . . . The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we shall use our grant making power to alter life in the u.s. so that we can comfortably be merged with the Soviet Union.”
- Rowan Gaither , 1953.
“The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”
- George Soros , 1997.
