Vladimir Putin

Russia needs a strong state power and must have it. But I am not calling for totalitarianism.

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

To pay more is the easy way. In fact, the solution possibilities to the problem are many.

The Chechnya problem is a centuries-old problem. The thing is that today, fundamentalists and terrorists are exploiting those centuries-old problems to accomplish their own objectives that have nothing to do whatsoever with the interests of Chechnya.

The task of the government is not only to pour honey into a cup, but sometimes to give bitter medicine.

Indeed, Russia and the U.S. were allies during the two tragic conflicts of the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there’s something objectively bringing us together in difficult times, and I think – I believe – it has to do with geopolitical interests and also has a moral component.

Within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and decision.

If he gave an assignment, he didn’t really care how it was done or who did it or what problems they had. It just had to get done, and that was that.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy. If you want to go towards democracy, the first thing is to involve the people in decision making, not to make it.

We get the leaders we vote for. We get the policies we vote for. And when we don’t vote, that’s when we wind up with government of, by and for other people.

Sometimes – history needs a push.

The ferocity of the assault against labor by the U.S. business class is illustrated by Washington’s failure, for 60 years, to ratify the core principle of international labor law, which guarantees freedom of association.

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

The Pentagon is in no sense a defense department. It has never defended the United States from anyone. It has only served to conduct aggression. And I think that the American people would be much better off without a Pentagon.

The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Is it possible, then, to doubt that we can and must gain victory over the German invaders? The enemy is not as strong as some terror-stricken pseudo-intellectuals picture him. The devil is not as terrible as he is painted.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.

If I were in a swing state, a state that matters, and the choice were Clinton or Trump, I would vote against Trump. And by arithmetic that means hold your nose and vote for Clinton.

I have a very positive attitude to anyone who is protecting the environment, but it’s inadmissible when people are using it as a means of promoting themselves, using it as a source of self-enrichment. I don’t want to name any specific examples… but often, environmentalism is used to blackmail companies.

While Trump’s antics occupy the attention of the media, his associates in Congress have been working intensively to advance the interests of their actual constituency-extreme wealth and corporate power-while dismantling what is of value to the general population andfuture generations.