Mikhail Gorbachev

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.’

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.

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.

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

The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.

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.

When violence against women is no longer societally accepted, no longer kept secret; when everyone understands that even one case is too many. That’s when it will change.

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.

I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country.

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‘sophisticated’ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama’s plan will see one single penny of their tax raised, whether it’s their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.

I think Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves. It’s a den of thieves.

Most of them have gotten really good at saying absolutely nothing. They’ve all got some kind of program, but when you listen to them, you still don’t know what they’re talking about.

The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense, and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.

One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.

You do not lament the loss of hair of one who has been beheaded.

I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.

I don’t mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, I’ve had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way: In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.