Vladimir Putin

The state security bodies should not be seen as an institution that works against society and the state; one needs to understand what makes them work against their own people.

It is necessary to suppress any extremist actions, on all sides, regardless of their origin.

… This phenomenon has its place in the world, and it’s developing. We need to monitor and analyze what’s going on thoroughly. And at some stage we will need to look at how we can take part in this process, how we can use it to avoid all sorts of restrictions in the sphere of international financial activity, among other things.

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

The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres – economic, political and humanitarian – and has imposed itself on other states.

How can a bureaucrat or a politician be trusted if he says loud words for the sake of Russia’s good while trying to take his funds, his money abroad?

But you really have to think through the talk about nonviolence. Sure, everybody’s in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?

A business or a big corporation is a fascist structure internally. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the orders or get out.

Chechnya is part and parcel of the Russian Federation.

There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.

George Orwell wrote that nationalists, who are practically the whole intellectual class of a country, not only do not disapprove of the crimes of their own state, but have the remarkable capacity not even to see them.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences…Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

[Governments are] …without exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.

Socialism is like a dream. Sooner or later you wake up to reality.

There is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Export in technical equipment is growing, which shows that some structural changes are going on in the economy. Export of agricultural produce, at 20 billion last year, was higher than defense exports, which were at 15 billion.