Mikhail Gorbachev

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.

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.

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

We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them. The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. Every US president has to have a war.

More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier…has to justify what it’s doing. There is only one way to do it — become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you’ve lost your capacity to understand what’s happening.

So we’re destroying the environment for organized human life. We’re threatening a terminal disaster with regular nuclear confrontations. Anybody who has looked at the record, which is shocking, would have to conclude that it’s a miracle that we’ve survived this long.

Since the white working class cannot be mobilized to support the class enemy on the basis of their actual programs, the ‘radical insurgency’ called ‘the Republican Party’ appeals to its constituency on what are called ‘social-cultural issues’: religion, fear, racism, nationalism.

We need business to understand its social responsibility, that the main task and objective for a business is not to generate extra income and to become rich and transfer the money abroad, but to look and evaluate what a businessman has done for the country, for the people, on whose account he or she has become so rich.

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

Karl Marx said, ‘The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.’ A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

A figure who receives money from abroad for his political work, and thus serves some foreign interest, cannot be a politician in Russia.

We must understand that governments cannot create real jobs. Only entrepreneurs can do that.

The CIA is mainly a branch of the executive to carry out secret and usually illegal activities that the executive branch wants. It wants them to be kept secret because it knows that the public won’t accept them. So it’s highly undemocratic even domestically.

As the Cold War came to a definitive end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms.

None of us and none of the Arabs trust Israel.