Boris Yeltsin

I would like to stress here that a lasting peace in the Chechen republic and so-called peace talks with the bandits are not the same thing, and I would ask everyone to make no mistake about that.

I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state – a new idea, this – even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms.

You can build a throne of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.

A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.

We, Russia, are prepared to work with others. I am convinced that stability and security in Europe cannot be considered without taking Russia into account.

Your commanders have ordered you to storm the White House and to arrest me. But I as the elected President of Russia give you the order to turn your tanks and not to fight against your own people.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

I always touch people, because I know that there’s a level of anxiety, people are teary or they’re nervous, and I just try to physically hold them and bring them down and say: ‘We’re here. I’m just Michelle.’

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’

The description of what the Europeans did is just monstrous. The British and Dutch merchants — actually merchant warriors — moved into Asia and broke into trading areas that had been functioning for long, long periods, with pretty well-established rules.

Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.

The United States could become a color-free society. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s perfectly possible that it would happen, and it wouldn’t change the political economy, hardly at all.

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

We don’t need a weakened government but a strong government that would take responsibility for the rights of the individual and care for the society as a whole.

To lay down… limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights… [are] the main objects.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

I was shocked more than most white people to find we had a black President!

In my position you have to read when you want to write and to talk when you would like to read.

The common good is the aspiration of all of us.

This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important-if not the most important-phenomena of modern capitalist economy.

Whoever is the first to cry ‘Stop the thief’ is the one who is guilty.