Mikhail Gorbachev

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.

What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

My life’s work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.

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

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country’s future.

If by ‘intellectual’ you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe…they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

Nobody has better respect for intelligence than Donald Trump.

Overall, we are moving in the right direction. We have started on the trajectory toward robust economic growth in Russia. Yes, this growth is humble, small, but it is also not a fall. Growth was at 1.5 percent last year.

The U.S.S. George H. W. Bush is a great thing in my life. It’s amazing. A great honor.

Voters decide nothing. Vote counters decide everything!

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

We are dealing with treachery and threats, which accompanied the establishment of Israel.

The first [task of the Pentagon] is to preserve an international system in which what are called American interests – which primarily means business interests, can flourish.

I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors.

I said on the Department of Justice, I would stay uninvolved. Now I may get involved at some point if it gets worse.

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

This administration is extremely unpredictable. Trump probably has no idea what he’s going to do five minutes from now, so you can’t-literally-make predictions with much confidence.