Vladimir Putin

I would prefer to abandon the terminology of the past. ‘Superpower’ is something which we used during the cold war time. Why use it now?

When the States already had nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels.

The Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization.

I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker’s family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

Where in the world have you seen construction people who do everything on time, with good quality and at minimal prices? Just give me one country like that. A country like that doesn’t exist in the world, you know. There’s not one such country anywhere in the world.

At a certain point, we saw the police cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street activists. I won’t call the actions of police appropriate or inappropriate.

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.

True friends of liberty… ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government… [because] men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interest without scruple and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose.

To confront power is costly and difficult; high standards of evidence and argument are imposed, and critical analysis is naturally not welcomed by those who are in a position to react vigorously and to determine the array of rewards and punishments.

The laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible. … Political liberty does not consist in the notion that a man may do whatever he pleases; liberty is the right to do whatsoever the laws allow. … The equality of the citizens consists in that they should all be subject to the same laws.

Power without a nation’s confidence is nothing.

So sure, if you can find a theory that has some real principles which are of some interest and you can draw conclusions from them which you can apply to interpreting the actual world around you then sure, that’s wonderful. If there are such theories, I am happy to see them.

I am not one who – who flamboyantly believes in throwing a lot of words around.

We do not want a single foot of foreign territory; but of our territory we shall not surrender a single inch to anyone.

In line with international law, only the U.N. Security Council could sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other pretext or method which might be used to justify the use of force against an independent sovereign state are inadmissible and can only be interpreted as an aggression.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.

While capital is now highly mobile, labor is increasingly immobile – and that has immediate consequences. It means that it is easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world with low environmental standards.

It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t.

If the nation is not capable of preserving itself and reproducing, if it loses it vital bearings and ideals, then it doesn’t need foreign enemies – it will fall apart on its own.

There used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. There used to be Soviet troops in the GDR. And we must honestly admit that they were occupation troops, which remained in Germany after WWII under the guise of allied troops. Now these occupation troops are gone, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact is no more. There is no Soviet threat, but NATO and U.S. troops are still in Europe. What for?