Mikhail Gorbachev

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

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

Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.

If current technological processes continue without change, the environment will change, and we, the human species, will either have to mutate or even die, to disappear, as many species have disappeared.

Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.

The democratic tendency… leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons… often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse… men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on.

With the first link, a chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.

People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don’t want to learn it themselves.

I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.

Top [U.S.] planners recognized that if we can control Middle East oil we can control the world. If you have your hand on the spigot you can control what other people do, whether we use it or not.

Latin America has, to a significant extent, liberated itself from foreign-meaning mostly U.S.-domination in the past 10 or 15 years. That’s a dramatic development in world affairs. It’s the first time in 500 years. It’s a big change.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world.

As important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don’t tell him the truth. Others won’t do it.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized …

The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s using it, they are all loving it. I don’t know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it.

So…should we take our guns, go out in the street and start destroying Chase Manhattan bank. Well if you want to get killed in five minutes that’s a good suggestion. Other than that it has absolutely nothing to do with the world so there is not any point in even discussing it.