Mikhail Gorbachev

Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.

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

The ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.

What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.

I say again that I am an atheist. I do not believe in God.

Sometimes it’s difficult to accept, to recognise one’s own mistakes, but one must do it. I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.

The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages…onward, to victory!

We Marxists believe that revolution will occur in other countries, as well. But it will occur at a time when it will be considered possible or necessary by revolutionaries of those countries.

I don’t regret anything. I did everything absolutely correctly.

I believe that the presidential term should be limited.

I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.

America didn’t invent human rights. Those rights are common to all people: nations, cultures, and religions cannot choose to simply opt out of them.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives – and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

I have a very positive attitude to anyone who is protecting the environment, but it’s inadmissible when people are using it as a means of promoting themselves, using it as a source of self-enrichment. I don’t want to name any specific examples… but often, environmentalism is used to blackmail companies.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

The problem with me is that I am fifty or one hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers have had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.

Every day, I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country.

You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

Preserve the President’s options. He may need them.