Vladimir Putin

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

It is clear to us that we have to defend our interests, and to do so consistently, not boorishly or rudely, in both the sphere of the economy and of defense.

China has created very good investment tools, including an entire network of very large funds. The Russian Private Investment Fund works with some of those funds, with China’s largest investment funds.

The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.

Whoever is the first to cry ‘Stop the thief’ is the one who is guilty.

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?

The Recovery Act is working, but it’s going to continue to work. It’s not over. A lot’s going to happen this summer. And even after the summer, there’s more to come with the act.

Europe has not been a heterogenous society to anything like the extent that the United States has. Nor has it been as mobile a society as the United States. These matters have been a bit under the cover, but they’re harder to keep under the cover.

You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I might just send them down to take care of it.

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.

I’d be the world’s worst drinker!

When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.

The big transnationals want to reduce freedom by undermining the democratic functioning of the states in which they’re based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful enough to protect and support them.

Why did the U.S. decide to normalize relations with Cuba?…Not a magnanimous gesture of courage to bring Cuba-to protect Cuba from its isolation, to save them from their isolation; quite the opposite, it was to save the U.S. from its isolation with the rest of the world.

In fact, the belief that neurophysiology is even relevant to the functioning of the mind is just hypothesis. Who knows if we’re looking at the right aspects of the brain at all. Maybe there are other aspects of the brain that nobody has even dreamt of looking at yet. That’s often happened in the history of science. When people say that the mental is the neurophysiological at a higher level, they’re being radically unscientific. We know a lot about the mental from a scientific point of view. We have explanatory theories that account for a lot of things. The belief that neurophysiology is implicated in these things could be true, but we have every little evidence for it. So, it’s just a kind of hope; look around and you see neurons; maybe they’re implicated.

In my position you have to read when you want to write and to talk when you would like to read.

It’s been fascinating – and exhilarating – watching this movement mushroom over the last few weeks, this campaign is about spreading a message of hope and change based on the central choice – five years or more of continued austerity, or a plan for investment and growth that stands up for the majority.

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

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: Defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must.