Mikhail Gorbachev

The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. … If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.

I couldn’t wait to get to the most powerful position, because I thought then I would be able to fix problems that only the leader can fix. But when I got there, I realized we needed revolutionary change.

I think the environmental problem will be the number one item on the agenda of the 21st century… This is a problem that cannot be postponed.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Americans have a severe disease – worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex.

Russia does not and cannot have any political choice but democracy. I want to say, and even stress, that we share those universal democratic principles taken around the whole world.

When you’re not engaged in the day-to-day struggles that everybody feels, you slowly start losing touch. And I think it’s important for the people in the White House to have a finger on the pulse.

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

In fact, I think it’s disgraceful even to keep Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy. I did visit him there once, but you can guess yourself. It’s, in many ways, worse than imprisonment.

Like all advanced societies, the U.S. has relied on state intervention in the economy from its origins, though for ideological reasons, the fact is commonly denied.

How can a bureaucrat or a politician be trusted if he says loud words for the sake of Russia’s good while trying to take his funds, his money abroad?

If the nation is not capable of preserving itself and reproducing, if it loses it vital bearings and ideals, then it doesn’t need foreign enemies – it will fall apart on its own.

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.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Using these unnamed sources, if done properly, carefully and fairly, provides more accountability in government.

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.

Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.

Any people has a right to self-determination, and now in Europe the process of diluting national sovereignty in the framework of a united Europe is more accepted.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized …

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.