Catherine the Great

In my position you have to read when you want to write and to talk when you would like to read.

Very early it was noticed that I had a good memory; therefore I was insistently tormented with learning everything by heart.

The title of Queen rang sweet to my ears, child though I was. … This idea of a crown began running in my head then like a tune, and has been running a lot in it ever since.

Experience shows that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.

The more a man knows, the more he forgives.

I like to praise and reward in a loud voice and to scold in a whisper.

Nuclear weapons are not a defence.

I think our Russian Football Union must play an active part in this… and develop a new generation of sportsmen and soccer players.

About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.

If you think about the way the society works in general, it works pretty much the way the founding fathers said. The society should be governed by those who own it, and they intend to follow Adam Smith’s vile maxim. That’s at the core of things.

I would question the use of something as simplistic as IQ to come to any conclusions regarding human affairs.

I believe all people are good. Some just do bad things. I had a teacher – God bless him, he died a few years ago -Luther H. Henson. I was a student of his at the time I lost my mother. He was my one person that seemed like anything I wanted to know, I could ask him and he’d give me an answer that was right. He told me, ‘There’ll come a time when people won’t judge you by your color; they’ll judge you by your deeds; how you act and how you treat people.’ Hearing professor Henson say that made me think, and I guess sort of toe the line a little bit more. And later on I heard Dr. King say, ‘I have a dream, where you’ll be judged not by the colour of the skin…’ Of course, I’d been a man for years when Dr. King came along, but it hit me hard because it strengthened for me what prof Henson had already said when I was a boy.

Don’t speak ill of your predecessors or successors. You didn’t walk in their shoes.

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

You know I vowed when I became President not to talk about the loneliest toughest job in the world and I didn’t.

Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

I always touch people, because I know that there’s a level of anxiety, people are teary or they’re nervous, and I just try to physically hold them and bring them down and say: ‘We’re here. I’m just Michelle.’

Every country should conduct its own reforms, should develop its own model, taking into account the experience of other countries, whether close neighbours or far away countries.

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.