Mikhail Gorbachev

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

I grew up in a family of peasants, and it was there that I saw the way that, for example, our wheat fields suffered as a result of dust storms, water erosion and wind erosion; I saw the effect of that on life – on human life.

Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.

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 not me, who? And if not now, when?

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

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps.

[on Trump] It is not our business to asses his worthiness, but he is the absolute leader of the presidential race.

We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism.

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events and the approval of the masses.

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.

There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience.

You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.

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

Lincoln said you cannot be President without spending some item on your knees. I have repeated that and a bunch of Atheists got all over me. Wait a minute. Does that mean that you cannot be President if you are an Atheist? I say yea that does mean that.

Karl Marx said, ‘The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.’ A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward.