Vladimir Putin

My English is very bad.

It’s alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist’s job is very interesting.

The events in Crimea themselves have nothing to do with what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other regions. In my opinion, when the world becomes unipolar, or when someone tries to make it so, then this one pole has the illusion that all issues can be settled through power. And only when there is a balance of power does the desire to negotiate appears.

Russia is opposed to the proliferation of mass destruction weapons, including nuclear weapons, and in this context we call upon our Iranian friends to abandon the uranium enrichment programme.

[on Trump] We can objectively see quite serious achievements even during his short time in office.

Democracy must learn to defend itself.

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.

I’m eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they’ve trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as [it] was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment.

There is no way you’re going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would’ve killed 300,000.

Economic control…is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served.

While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.

Public servants are paid to serve the American people. Do it well.

Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’. The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

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

I don’t respond in any way to personal abuse that is thrown at me.

When I’ve talked about the idea of being President, I’m not saying I have any political views, I don’t have views on politics, I just have a view on humanity. On people. On the truth.

Recently one of Germany’s famous and popular publications wrote that President Trump is pushing Europe toward Putin. If we take this together with an earlier joke, that Russia influenced elections in the United States, then this all taken together starts sounding pretty funny. We apparently influenced the election of the U.S. President, and then he gifted us Europe. Total nonsense. There’s no way to describe this other than as a joke.

About half of what are called US exports to Mexico are intrafirm transfers of this sort. They don’t enter the Mexican market, and there’s no meaningful sense in which they’re exports to Mexico. Still, that’s called ‘trade.’