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.
I welcome David Cameron’s work. This idea, or programme, that he describes as a Big Society, as I understand it, means that the gaps between different groups of people should be bridged. I think this is a very democratic idea, and I support that.
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.
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.
Political leaders still think things can be done through force, but that cannot solve terrorism. Backwardness is the breeding ground of terror, and that is what we have to fight.
I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.
We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.
On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them: ‘You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.’
It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.
If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.
Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
There are still independent newspapers and magazines, they do exist. But as for television, the situation is not as good. It’s one of the main problems. I would say, as regards the development of democracy, of democracy laying down roots – that is something that Russia still needs to address.
The ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.
If current technological processes continue without change, the environment will change, and we, the human species, will either have to mutate or even die, to disappear, as many species have disappeared.
What about Jesus Christ? I say that he was a precursor of idealists; a precursor of socialists.
The world is changed by idealists.
I read in Novaya Gazeta a list of all the properties owned by Roman Abramovich, and it’s incredible. I’m ashamed.
Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.
Democracy must learn to defend itself.
Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.
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