Roman Abramovich

I live on a plane. I like to visit London. If I had to think where I could live if not Moscow, London would be my first choice, and second would be New York. In Moscow I feel most comfortable. I’m used to four different seasons; it’s difficult for people in London to understand. People brought up in Russia like my kids want to play in the snow.

In my personal opinion, Russia is no less democratic than it used to be. It is a democratic country. It is democratic enough.

People who know me said I will win one or two Premierships and will not be interested after that. The reality is that we’ve won two Premierships but I’m more excited about this particular season than last year or the year before. I am a fan of special nature. I’m getting excited before every single game. The trophy at the end is less important than the process itself.

I never aspired to be a public figure. I have always been interested primarily in real business and the development of business strategies.

I have no Napoleonic dream. I’m just hard-working and pragmatic.

The Holocaust was a crime without parallel in history, and I am proud to launch an initiative to raise awareness of and to tackle anti-Semitism in all its forms. This is the start of an important journey and we all have a part to play.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

The Eurasian union is a project meant to preserve the identities of nations and the historic Eurasian community in the new century, in a new world.

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Scholars per se do not have deeper political insights than other persons and are not morally superior to others. But they are obligated to help politicians seek and find the truth.

There’s a lot of debate about what’s happening in the Labour party at the present time. And I am inundated with questions, questions, questions all the time. And I have patience that is infinite to answer questions, questions, questions. But one I got today really did puzzle me. They said: how are you coping with the pressure that’s on you? I simply said this: ‘There is no pressure on me. None whatsoever.’ The real pressure, the real pressure – real pressure – is when you don’t have enough money to feed your kids, when you don’t have a roof over your head, when you’re wondering if you’re going to be cared for. When you’re wondering how you can survive. You’re wondering how you’re going to cope with the debts you’ve incurred … That is the real pressure in our society. For those people struggling on low pay, struggling on zero-hours contracts, not knowing what’s coming from one week to the other, not knowing if they’ll be able to pay the rent, not knowing if they’re going to be homeless, not knowing if their children will end up in care, that’s the kind of brutal pressure that’s put on people every day of the week in this country.

If someone was watching this from Mars, they’d collapse in ridicule. The United States is telling Iran to stop its aggressive militarism? I mean we occupy two countries on their border…

We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere as long as the policy you’ve decided upon is being carried out.

The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people – white men overwhelmingly – who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society.

Politics is human beings; it’s addition rather than subtraction.

It was not known in 1945 that we were not only entering the nuclear age, but entering a new geological epoch, what geologists call the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity is having severe and deleterious effects on the environment in which human and other life can survive.