Catherine the Great

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.

You were in a mood to quarrel. Please inform me once the inclination passes.

You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.

It is better to inspire a reform than to enforce it.

Happiness and unhappiness are in the heart and spirit of each one of us: If you feel unhappy, then place yourself above that and act so that your happiness does not get to be dependent on anything.

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

Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely and who rely on you

You’re having a lot of fun, right? Suppose Hillary got elected instead of Trump, you think it would be so exciting?

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

With complex integrated supply chains, subcontracting and other such devices, corporate ownership of the world’s wealth is becoming a more realistic measure of global power than national wealth…

Russia will not soon become, if it ever becomes, a second copy of the United States or England – where liberal value have deep historic roots.

I don’t regret anything. I did everything absolutely correctly.

The big transnationals want to reduce freedom by undermining the democratic functioning of the states in which they’re based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful enough to protect and support them.

They invited a large investor, Coca-Cola, to take over a plot of land in Pulkovo Heights and install high-capacity power and communications cables, hoping that other companies would follow suit. It worked. After Coca-Cola developed their piece of land, Gillette came, then Wrigley, and then some pharmaceutical companies. An economic zone thus took shape within the city, where total investment now exceeds half a billion dollars. Furthermore, with the Committee’s encouragement, the city’s infrastructure began to be modernized to create the conditions necessary for successful business. The first major deal that Putin supported was the completion of a fiber-optic cable to Copenhagen. This project had been initiated back in the Soviet era but never completed. Now the efforts were successful, providing St. Petersburg with world-class international telephone connections.

It’s important to remember that the constitutional system was not designed in the first place to defend the rights of people. Rather, the rights of people had to be balanced, as Madison put it, against what he called ‘the rights of property.’

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as ’embedded.’ To say, ‘I’m an embedded journalist’ is to say, ‘I’m a government Propagandist.

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.

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.

For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline “will become superfluous” as the freely associated producers “work for their own accord” (Marx).

Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican – and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.