Talk:Nikita Khrushchev

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If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf

It's just a russian proverb

217.10.33.159 16:47, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

IT BELONGS TO OTHERS TOO!

• Your children’s children will live under COMMUNISM. You AMERICANS are so gullible. No, you won’t accept COMMUNISM outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of SOCIALISM until you will finally wake up & find that you already have COMMUNISM. We won’t ever have to fight you; we’ll weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.
  • Supposedly in 1959, but i don't have a credible source.

• When all the world is socialist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything.
  • "It was the Soviet leader, Kruschev, who declared that when the whole world was socialist – and like all Soviet leaders he never doubted that it would be – then Switzerland would have to be kept as a free capitalist private enterprise country to enable everyone to find out what the real price of everything was."
  • "Intelligence Digest", Kenneth Hugh De Courcy, John De Courcy, 1976.

• We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism. (this quote is STILL unverified)

• Don't you worry about the foreign minister. The foreign minister will do anything I tell him. If I say: "take down your trousers and sit with your bare bottom on a block of ice", Gromyko will do so until further notice.
  • To John F. Kennedy in Vienna in 1961

• It will keep the wolf out.
  • Referring to the Berlin Wall, the wolf meaning the West.

• He who cannot eat horsemeat need not do so. Let him eat pork. But he who cannot eat pork, let him eat horsemeat. It’s simply a question of taste.

• Politicians are the same all over: they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

• If one cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.

• When you are skinning your customers you should leave some skin on to grow again so that you can skin them again.

• They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won. Mankind won.

• If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf.

• Bombs do not choose. They will hit everything. -BOOM!-

• Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.

• Do you think when two representatives holding diametrically opposing views get together and shake hands, the contradictions between our systems will simply melt away? What kind of a daydream is that?

• I once said, "We will bury you," and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

• We say the name of God, but that is only out of habit.

• They pay little attention to what we say and prefer to read tea leaves.

• The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.

• Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man.

• Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

• Life is short. Live it up.

• In a fight you don't stop to choose your cudgels.

• If you live among dogs, keep a stick. After all, this is what a hound has teeth for ― to bite when he feels like it!

• The press is our chief ideological weapon.

• All the sparrows on the rooftops are crying about the fact that the most imperialist nation that is supporting the colonial regime in the colonies is the United States of America.

• I will die...people will place my actions on a balance. On one side the bad, on the other, the kind...and the kind will outweigh.

• I worked in a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a Communist.

• If I do not know everything, then I would say that you know nothing about communism; nothing except fear of it.

• Historians are the most powerful and dangerous members of any society. They must be watched carefully... They can spoil everything.

• We must select a smaller number of standard designs .. and conduct our mass building programs using only these designs over the course of, say, five years .. and if no better designs turn up, then continue in the same way for the next five years.

• We and you ought not pull on the ends of a rope in which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.

• Kennedy: We have enough missiles to blow you [USSR] up thirty times over. Khrushchev: We have enough to blow you up only once, but that will be enough for us.

• Aircraft carriers, of course are the second most effective weapon in a modern navy (after submarines). I’ll admit I felt a nagging desire to have some in our own navy but we couldn’t afford to build them. They were simply beyond our means.

• We'll kick you so hard you won't remember your own name.
  • Talking to John F. Kennedy about the Berlin Wall

• The United States now sleeps under a Soviet moon.
  • Commenting on Sputnik 1, Earth's first artificial satellite

• The Grape-fruit satellite.
  • Commenting on the Vanguard program

• A mere flea hop.
  • Commenting on Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 space flight which travelled only 187 km into space, and returned while Yuri Gagarin was sent up to 315 km and went into orbit.

• We have beaten you to the moon, but you have beaten us in sausage making.
  • In a meatpacking plant in Iowa referring to Luna 2, which, previously that same day, became the first spacecraft to contact the Moon. (September 13, 1959)

• Voroshilov is the biggest bag of shit in the army.
  • On Marshal Kliment Voroshilov and his incompetent handling of the Russo-Finnish War.

• He reminded me of those cartoons we drew of capitalists during the civil war.
  • After meeting United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther in 1959.

• Ah, but it is no bigger than a tiny orange.
  • Khrushchev's remarks on the grapefruit-sized Vanguard satellite.

• Your view of Soviet power comes straight from the toilet, and if you don't like it, you can go to hell.
  • From a 1961 address to the Soviet Writers Congress attacking dissidents.

This is quoted in Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali. Sorry, I don’t have the book, I don’t have a page number. If I recall correctly, it is not in this exact form, it is more like “. . . your view of Soviet power comes straight from the toilet . . . if you don't like it, you can go to hell”; and it may have been from a semi-informal meetings with artists rather than an address (though, thinking about this now, I may be mistaken). I hope this helpful. 76.173.76.247 09:25, 25 October 2011 (UTC)CJS Hello again, I found it! William Taubman, Khrushchev : the man and his era, New York : W. W. Norton & Co., 2003, p. 594. The quote appears as : “ . . . Your view of Soviet power is from inside a toilet! . . . If you don’t like it here, you can go to hell. . . . ” [ ellipses in original ]. The occasion was a function of the Central Committee with 140 invited writers and artists, held on 7 – 8 March 1963; apparently it was a formal occasion, but Khrushchev did not use his prepared remarks and launched into a series of impromptu exchanges with various artists present. 76.173.76.247 06:00, 19 November 2011 (UTC)CJS

• We launched Gagarin and Titov into space, and we have the ability to send a nuclear warhead to any place on the planet.
  • An August 1961 speech following the flight of Vostok 2.

• If that's the man the Americans elected for their president, I truly do feel sorry for them.
  • After his 1961 summit meeting with President Kennedy.

• If we could promise the people nothing but revolution, they'd scratch their heads and say "Isn't it better to have good goulash?"
  • On Chinese leader Mao Zedong's belief in continuous revolution.

• We don't even need an army at all. All we really need are nuclear-armed rockets and a few soldiers to guard the launching sites.
  • After visiting the Baikonur Launch Center in September 1964.

Here's One

• A person shouldn't shit where he is about to eat.
  • Speech given after the U2 spy plane incident.

Apocryphal quotes from Khrushchev?

The quote that often comes to mind for Khrushchev is "Who said that?", but it was almost certainly apocryphal, and I think that should be mentioned in the quote page. Near as I can tell there is no evidence he actually said it, but it appears in various jokes. Usually supposed to have happened just after a speech denouncing Stalin, when someone in the crowd shouts something like "And what were you doing when all these crimes occurred?" Khrushchev shouts back: "Who said that?" No one answers, and the punchline is something like "I was doing exactly what you are doing now, comrade, keeping my silence." Shanen (talk) 22:55, 6 October 2017 (UTC)