Mikhail Gorbachev

I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature.

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

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

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

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

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.

Anarchism calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave.

You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

It’s a historical phenomenon that in 250 years, a nation could move from a colony into the most prosperous nation of the world and the leader of the world. It is indeed an achievement, a tribute to the talent of the American nation, the American people and an optimal political and economic system.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the current economic recession, which is particularly powerful in New York City, have put a number of building plans on hold for the time being.

NATO was built to counteract the Soviet Union in its day and time. At this point there is no threat coming from the Soviet Union, because there is no Soviet Union anymore. And where there was the Soviet Union once, there is now a number of countries, among them the new and democratic Russia.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

Would I do business with Putin? Sure. And I’d challenge him on human rights in Russia, challenge him on these issues and challenge him on that whole basis of that relationship.

I don’t see why it’s more violent for a person to go into a store and take what’s there than it is for a person who has money that was achieved by violent methods to go into the store and take what’s there by handing over the money.

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

I was democratically elected leader of our party for a new kind of politics by 60 percent of Labour members and supporters, and I will not betray them by resigning. Today’s vote on Brexit has no constitutional legitimacy.

China is a great country with a great culture, populated by fascinating, industrious and talented people.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

There’s an array of terms of abuse [in the U.S.], like “Marxist,” but it doesn’t matter really, it’s a very free society. So if you’re vilified by some commissars, who cares, you go on-you do your work anyway.

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.