Vladimir Putin

I think the American people should express their preferences, and we’ll accept their choice.

President Obama hasn’t been elected by the American people in order to be pleasant to Russia.

We’re no longer in the Cold War. Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable.

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That’s the way it’s done in the U.S., and that’s the way it’s done in Russia.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

In some intellectual circles, it is considered naive or foolish to be guided by moral principles. About this form of idiocy, I will have nothing to say.

More time and at least a degree of reasonableness in the treatment of the Labour Party. Because the message that we’re putting out on austerity hasn’t fundamentally changed. There’s been an enormous barrier in getting it across, but now I think a lot of people understand what we’re saying and why we’re saying it.

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate.

Most of them have gotten really good at saying absolutely nothing. They’ve all got some kind of program, but when you listen to them, you still don’t know what they’re talking about.

I addressed directly with President Putin the issue of Russian interference in our elections. I felt this was a message best delivered in person. Spent a great deal of time talking about it. And President Putin may very well want to address it, and very strongly, because he feels very strongly about it, and he has an interesting idea.

Americans have a severe disease – worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex.

If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications.

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

Political activities in Russia should be as transparent as possible. Financing political activities from abroad is something the state should keep an eye on.

I would bet if you took a poll in the FBI I would win that poll by more than anybody’s won a poll.

The New York Times, reported in 2009, that the Obama administration had made a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry in which it promised not to allow the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate drug prices, as is done in every other country…

I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.

Don’t say “the White House wants.” Buildings can’t want.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.