Vladimir Putin

If one looks at the map of the world, it’s difficult to find Iraq, and one would think it rather easy to subdue such a small country.

Politics should not interfere with sports. And sports should impact politics.

Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.

Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.

What is a Rechtsstaat? It is obedience to the existing law.

Our aims are absolutely clear: They are a high living standard in the country and a secure, free and comfortable life.

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

We can make a rough distinction between the managerial class and the rest. The managers take part in decision-making in the state, the private economy, and the doctrinal institutions. The rest are to cede authority to state and private elites, to accept what they are told…

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, up to its capital, but we did not consider that a disaster. Why? Because it was very clear that there are ways to resist.

Primarily the United States has overstepped its national borders, and in every area.

In the execution of Presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.

Ultimately it’s a question of whether democracy is going to be allowed to exist, and to what extent. And it’s entirely natural that the business world, along with the state, which they largely dominate, would want to limit democracy. It threatens them.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category-except for the category of familiarity.

At a certain point, we saw the police cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street activists. I won’t call the actions of police appropriate or inappropriate.

The Obama policies [2016] are to try to pressure Mexico to keep Central American immigrants from coming anywhere near us. Who are the Central American immigrants? These are people fleeing from the wreckage left by US government policies.

It’s not that India was a peaceful place before — it wasn’t. Nor was the western hemisphere a pacifist utopia. But there’s no doubt that almost everywhere the Europeans went they raised the level of violence to a significant degree.

When I read Paris Post-Modernist talk…what I see is intellectuals interacting with one another in ways which are incomprehensible to the public and, to be frank, incomprehensible to me.

In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did.