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

Attributed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the remark is a sardonic generalization about political rhetoric. Its humor rests on an absurd image—promising a bridge where no river exists—to suggest that campaign pledges can be disconnected from real needs, constraints, or even reality itself. The line implies that politicians often substitute grand, visible projects and confident promises for careful diagnosis of problems, and that this tendency transcends national systems and ideologies (“the same all over”). As a piece of political folklore, it functions less as a precise historical statement than as a durable critique of opportunism, performative problem‑solving, and the incentives that reward promises over delivery.