Vladimir Putin

We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force.

We’re no longer in the Cold War. Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable.

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

I believe the U.S. already understands and will understand more and more that only a strong Russia will respond to the genuine interests of the United States.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

You’re having a lot of fun, right? Suppose Hillary got elected instead of Trump, you think it would be so exciting?

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline “will become superfluous” as the freely associated producers “work for their own accord” (Marx).

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’.

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.

When I hear people say, ‘you run,’ it’s part of the problem. We still didn’t get ‘yes we can’ right. It’s not ‘yes you can,’ it’s ‘yes we can.’ And until we get that right, it doesn’t matter who runs.

And [Saudi Arabia] is strongly backed by the United States and its allies, Britain and France. Reason? It’s got a lot of oil. It’s got a lot of money. You can sell them a lot of arms, I think tens of billions of dollars of arms.

Large corporate advertisers on TV will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from 3rd World tyrannies.

Economic control…is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served.

…the Pentagon has been the primary Keynesian mechanism whereby the government intervenes to maintain what is ludicrously called the health of the economy by inducing production, that means production of waste and destruction

Libya is divided into tribes and clans.

… the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

It is unacceptable that many women and girls adapt their daily lives in order to avoid being harassed on the street, public transport, and in other public places from the park to the supermarket.

Based on our preliminary calculations, we may in the next six years spend 17 trillion roubles (Putin said billion, but meant trillion), but to achieve the goals that we have discussed, we will need an additional 8 trillion roubles. And it is clear where we are going to find them.