“You can see these two species coexisting in a long period of stability; then on of the them drops out and all hell breaks loose. Tremendous instability. That's the Soviet Union.”
Christopher Langton in: Roger Lewin (1990) Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos New York, Macmillan. p. 196
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Christopher Langton11
American computer scientist 1949Related quotes
Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist
Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)
Carl Safina (1955) American biologist
Gause 1934
[Foraging habitat partitioning in Roseate and Common Terns, The Auk, 107, 2, April 1990, 351–358, 10.2307/4087619, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4087619]
Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer
The Tribune (28 March 1986).
1980s
“I never wanted two things: money or to live outside Soviet Union.”
Lev Yashin (1929–1990) Soviet association football player
As quoted in Lev Yashin, the impregnable Spider https://www.fifa.com/news/lev-yashin-the-impregnable-spider.
Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Statement in September 1939, as quoted in "Stalin's pact with Hitler" in WWII Behind Closed Doors at PBS http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/episode-1/ep1_stalins_pact.html <br class="br">Contemporary witnesses
“Fascism lasted twelve years in Germany. Stalinism lasted twice as long in the Soviet Union.”
Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships
Context: Fascism lasted twelve years in Germany. Stalinism lasted twice as long in the Soviet Union. There are many common features but also certain differences. Stalinism exhibited a much more subtle kind of hypocrisy and demagogy, with reliance not on an openly cannibalistic program like Hitler's but on a progressive, scientific, and popular socialist ideology.
This served as a convenient screen for deceiving the working class, for weakening the vigilance of the intellectuals and other rivals in the struggle for power, with the treacherous and sudden use of the machinery of torture, execution, and informants, intimidating and making fools of millions of people, the majority of whom were neither cowards nor fools. As a consequence of this "specific feature" of Stalinism, it was the Soviet people, its most active, talented, and honest representatives, who suffered the most terrible blow.
Andrey Voznesensky (1933–2010) Soviet poet
Clive James From the Land of Shadows (London: Picador, 1983) p. 222.
Criticism
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
2006 <br class="br">Source: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451213