The Wall will still be standing in 50 and even in 100 years; if the re — Berlin Wall

"The Wall certainly ought not to be a permanent feature of the European landscape. I see no reason why the Soviet Union should think it is—it is to their advantage in any way to leave there that monument to communist failure."

"[Erich Honecker] was succeeded by ‘a brief and embarrassed phantom’ (to use Disraeli’s phrase) called Egon Krentz, who lasted exactly seven weeks. On 4 November a million marched in East Berlin. Five days later, at a historic press conference held by the East Berlin party boss, Gunter Schabowski, it was announced that frontier police would no longer try to prevent East Germans from leaving the country. A Daily Telegraph reporter asked the key question: ‘What about the Berlin Wall?’ and was told it was no longer an exit-barrier. That night the Berlin Wall, the ugly and despised testament to Communist oppression, where so many hundreds of German democrats had died trying to escape, was the scene of a wild orgy of rejoicing and destruction, as young Germans hacked at it with pickaxes. Television carried these historic scenes around the world and in other East European capitals, and, to use, ironically, a phrase of Marx’s, ‘the enflamed masses began to scream ça ira, ça ira!’"

"Walls in the mind often stand longer than those built of concrete."

"General Secretary Gorbachev’s policy of restructuring brings with it, for the first time since the end of World War II, a justifiable hope of overcoming the East-West conflict."

"On the very same day the first brick of the Ram Shila foundation was being laid at Ayodhya, the Berliners were removing bricks from the Berlin Wall. While a temple was going up in Ayodhya, a communist temple was being demolished five thousand miles away in Europe. If this is not history, I do not know what is. (...) The post-Nehru era began at Ayodhya on November 9, and it will gather momentum in the years to come, just as the post-communist era in Europe and elsewhere."

"It was a historic deed that preserved the liberty of our people and laid the foundations for the sustained prosperity of our socialist state."