Vladimir Putin

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this.

It’s alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.

Above all, such sports as judo, in my view, teach people to relate to each other. They teach us to respect a partner, teach us to understand that an externally weak partner can not only put up worthy resistance, but, if you relax and take too much for granted, may even win.

You can swim any way you like in the Dead Sea, actually.

We will chase terrorists everywhere. If in an airport, then in the airport. So if we find them in the toilet, excuse me, we’ll rub them out in the outhouse. And that’s it, case closed.

I think every person should have some faith inside him, in his heart. What matters is not an external display of this faith, but the inner state of the soul.

The business classes are very class-conscious-they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized.

I’m a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.

Sometimes it’s difficult to accept, to recognise one’s own mistakes, but one must do it. I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.

To the extent that Trump’s programs are coherent, they fall into the same general category of those of Paul Ryan, who has granted us the kindness of spelling them out: increase spending on the military…and cut back taxes, mainly on the rich, with no new revenue sources.

I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics.

If he gave an assignment, he didn’t really care how it was done or who did it or what problems they had. It just had to get done, and that was that.

An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.

Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.

If the Democrats could get their act together, overcoming the schism between the donor-oriented New Democrat Party management and the increasingly activist and social democratic base, they would have a decent chance to take over Congress.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

The revolution does not need historians.

Despite the ethnic diversity within each nation, the social fabric of the region by and large is one.