Vladimir Putin

You can do a lot more with weapons and politeness than just politeness.

President Obama hasn’t been elected by the American people in order to be pleasant to Russia.

I think every person should have some faith inside him, in his heart. What matters is not an external display of this faith, but the inner state of the soul.

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.

Our military might is the guarantor of Russia’s security and independence.

Obviously, I’m always thinking about it. A successor, in the ordinary sense of the word – no, the Russian people, the voters will decide who that will be. But of course I think that we should raise a new, young generation of leaders, responsible people who will be able to take on the responsibility of Russia.

I may find Saddam Hussein’s regime abhorrent – any normal person would – but the survival of it is in his hands.

Don’t speak ill of your predecessors or successors. You didn’t walk in their shoes.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the [“The US Donor Relief Act of 2017”] will add $1 trillion to deficits over the next decade. Virtually every economist generally agrees. But not 80 percent of Republican voters…

We need business to understand its social responsibility, that the main task and objective for a business is not to generate extra income and to become rich and transfer the money abroad, but to look and evaluate what a businessman has done for the country, for the people, on whose account he or she has become so rich.

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

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

The only reason I don’t use the word class is that the terminology of political discourse is so debased it’s hard to find any words at all. That’s part of the point — to make it impossible to talk.

Ultimately it’s a question of whether democracy is going to be allowed to exist, and to what extent. And it’s entirely natural that the business world, along with the state, which they largely dominate, would want to limit democracy. It threatens them.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the current economic recession, which is particularly powerful in New York City, have put a number of building plans on hold for the time being.

I think the international community should unite to fight such inhuman phenomena as terror attacks and the murder of totally innocent people.

We will use funds returned from Brussels after Brexit to invest in our public services and jobs of the future, not tax cuts for the richest.

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be ever so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. … Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

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.

Mark Twain has wonderful anti-imperialist essays. But you don’t find reference to them. I think the first general publication of them was in a book, Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire, edited by Jim Zwick about 10 years ago.