Vladimir Putin

Demographers affirm that choosing to have a second child is already a potential choice in favour of a third.

I think: the powers like to talk about ‘freedom’ in order to wash the population’s brains.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

The United States and Russian security services regularly exchange information.

But do the governors themselves need that? Are they ready to line up under the vertikal? They are. After all, the governors are part of the country, and they also suffer from management weaknesses. Not everyone is going to like everything. You can’t please everybody, but you can find some common approaches. I was also interested in learning more about the country. I had only ever worked in St. Petersburg, apart from the time I spent abroad. . . . Of course, my seven years of experience in Peter was good experience, both administrative and managerial. But Peter isn’t the whole country. I wanted to travel and see things. So, why did you drop that interesting job and go to work as director of the FSB? Do you have some affinity for the agencies? No. I wasn’t asked whether or not I wanted to go, and they had given me no inkling that I was even being considered for such an appointment. The president simply signed a decree. . . .

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

China’s refusal to accept opium from Britain’s Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations’.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

I welcome David Cameron’s work. This idea, or programme, that he describes as a Big Society, as I understand it, means that the gaps between different groups of people should be bridged. I think this is a very democratic idea, and I support that.

I would prefer to think of anarchism as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist [Bakunin, Kropotkin and others.]

I can remember from childhood, that there were neighborhoods where if you went, you’d be beaten up. You weren’t supposed to be there. The people who were doing it — kids — felt justified and righteous about it. They were defending their turf. What else do they have to defend?

I seemed to be in a minority on every subject. Every argument that came up, every debate that came up, I was in a minority of one usually, sometimes two. That was quite character forming.

Every country should conduct its own reforms, should develop its own model, taking into account the experience of other countries, whether close neighbours or far away countries.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.

The fightback now of our party gathers speed and gathers pace.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized …