Mikhail Gorbachev

I think God has some mechanism that he uses to punish those that make mistakes.

Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.

I think we need more young people; we need to elect young people to government. We need to give them a chance, in the media, in politics, in democracy.

If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as [it] was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment.

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the ‘star’ system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another – Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida – some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.

That government is best which governs least.

There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic – solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups – sectors of these movements do very valuable work.

Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election.

Just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western Europe….Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews.

One reason why Canada has national healthcare and the United States doesn’t, is that in Canada the labor movements militantly advocated for national healthcare. In the United States the same unions militantly advocated for good healthcare for themselves.

U.S. society doesn’t want to play the role of international policeman.

We don’t let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?

The problem with me is that I am fifty or one hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers have had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.

You could imagine that a democratic society would have an organization that carries out intelligence gathering functions. But that’s a very minor part of what the CIA does.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

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

Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.

My mission is to lead the country out of a bad situation of corruption, depression and slavery. After I rid the country of these vices, I will then organize and supervise a general election of a genuinely democratic civilian government.