Mikhail Gorbachev

There should be competition and exchanges between different countries, but there are certainly certain universal values, and that is freedom and democracy.

I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.

I don’t think Russia is setting this as a goal; I don’t think this should be Russia’s goal. I think even the United States doesn’t need to be a superpower. China doesn’t need to be a superpower. It’s a different world.

I think God has some mechanism that he uses to punish those that make mistakes.

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.

If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

Now the shift is toward trying to keep taxes just on wages and on consumption – which everyone has to do – not, say, on dividends, which only go to the rich. And that’s shifted the burden enormously.

If governments would only understand that if people are left alone they’ll work out their own salvation.

My own view is that the CIA is very much under the control of executive power….It often looks as though it’s undertaking initiatives on its own, but that’s because the executive wants to preserve deniability.

Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought – by force of circumstances, not argument – to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.

Have not fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany claimed that they have attained similar results [as in U.S.S.R.]? Have not both been achieved at the price of privation and personal liberty sacrificed for the good of the state?

It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

He told me was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.But that experience also taught me something.Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president.

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.

We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

Nation-state systems basically arose in Europe in their modern sense, and they’re extremely unnatural social organizations. They had to be imposed on the populations by violence, extreme violence.

When the States already had nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels.

President Obama hasn’t been elected by the American people in order to be pleasant to Russia.

The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.