Mikhail Gorbachev

My life’s work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

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

I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.

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

Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

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.

For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is… not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.

When I see people go at the President, why not try love, for one person to stand up against all odds and just hug somebody the way that Alice Johnson hugged her family when she got out of jail?.

The financial industry, that means Goldman Sachs, if managed properly, will calculate the potential cost to itself if a loan goes bad, but not the impact on the financial system, which can be severe. This inherent deficiency of markets is well known.

I understand that it’s hard for everyone, but one cannot give in to emotions… we’ll have to draw lessons from the current crisis and now we’ll have to work on overcoming it.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

We are not going to close anything… I also worked in the security services and know it is easiest to ban, and harder to find civilized solutions. Therefore, I’m going to urge all my colleagues to take this route, the route of security and law enforcement agencies using modern methods to combat offences, including terrorism, without restricting freedoms including on the Internet.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

According to what you’re taught in economics courses, our system is based on free markets with entrepreneurial initiative and rational choices by informed consumers. Well, the reality is radically different.

[no the rich] quite happy to pay more tax to fund better public services or to pay down our debt.

The Ethiopian government’s use of the railway from Djibouti to Addis Ababa was, in practice, a hazardous regards transport of arms intended for the Ethiopian forces.

Poor and suffering people do not have the luxury of indulging in fairy tales. Not uncommonly, their own experience gives them a grasp of realities that are well concealed by the intellectual culture.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences…Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

Controversy may rage as long as it adheres to the presuppositions that define the consensus of elites, and it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds…while reinforcing the belief that freedom reigns.

The Affordable Care Act isn’t Barack’s legacy, it’s the country’s legacy.