Vladimir Putin

I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.

One has to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill. So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or deliberately be lying.

The introduction, for example, of restrictive tariffs on steel, on aluminum, not only for Europe but also for Canada and Mexico, in essence these are also sanctions… They are related to the pragmatic national interests of the United States.

The democratic choice Russian people made in the early 90’s is final.

Or stay in Chechnya and wait to be attacked? What should we do? I have said what we must do. We must go through the mountain caves and scatter and destroy all those who are armed. Perhaps after the presidential elections, we should introduce direct presidential rule there for a couple of years. We must rebuild the economy and the social services, show the people that normal life is possible. We must pull the young generation out of the environment of violence in which it is living. We must put a program of education in place . . . We must work. We must not abandon Chechnya as we did before. In fact, we did a criminal thing back then, when we abandoned the Chechen people and undermined Russia. Now we must work hard, and then transfer to full fledged political procedures, allowing them and us to decide how we can coexist. It is unavoidable fact: We must live together. We have no plans to deport Chechens, as Stalin once solved the problem. And Russia has no other choice. Nobody can impose a solution on us by force but we are prepared to take maximum consideration of Chechen

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

It is quite possible-overwhelmingly probable, one might guess-that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

I mean, any issue of any complexity is going to have some diversity of opinion. But when you get a unanimous vote to kill the Iranian deal or the Affordable Care Act or whatever the next thing may be, you know you’re not dealing with a political party.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

When the interests of the privileged and powerful are the guiding commitment of both political factions, people who do not share these interests tend to stay home.

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.

I like beer

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

My parents told me that children were taken from their families in 1941, and my mother had a child taken from her – with the goal of saving him.

The problem is not the occupation, but how people deal with it.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Maybe they have nothing else to do in America but to talk about me.

When [Lenin] became the leader, he didn’t waste much time, and Trotsky helped him, in instituting a pretty repressive regime with the basic elements of Stalinism. They moved pretty quickly to dismantle most of the organs of popular power.