Mikhail Gorbachev

You cannot put Russia down on its knees and hold it there because Russia will ultimately pull out.

I read in Novaya Gazeta a list of all the properties owned by Roman Abramovich, and it’s incredible. I’m ashamed.

The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.

There are still independent newspapers and magazines, they do exist. But as for television, the situation is not as good. It’s one of the main problems. I would say, as regards the development of democracy, of democracy laying down roots – that is something that Russia still needs to address.

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

Ex-Presidents of the United States get state subsidies. Not so in Russia. You get no government support.

Cointelpro really told you something about the government. Therefore, it was basically suppressed, it is still suppressed so that people don’t know anything about it. Watergate, on the other hand, was a minor scandal.

If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?

I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, ‘What kind of peace?’

We, in Syria, our point of view stems from our experience.

In Downing Street they called me ‘Boss’. Civil servants would always call me ‘Prime Minister’.

El Chapo and the Mexican drug cartels use the border unimpeded like it was a vacuum cleaner, sucking drugs and death right into the U.S.

…if you ask me whether or not I’m an atheist, I wouldn’t even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I’m supposed not to believe in, and I’ve never seen an explanation.

How can a bureaucrat or a politician be trusted if he says loud words for the sake of Russia’s good while trying to take his funds, his money abroad?

Libya is divided into tribes and clans.

In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious…The other group is the high planning sectors of the government.

It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’

China’s refusal to accept opium from Britain’s Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations’.

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.