Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes
- All Quotes
-
You are fortunate to live here. If I were your President, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco!
-
History punishes those that come late to it.
-
I certainly wouldn't say that we loved the arms race. Trillions of dollars were used to stoke it. For our economy, which was smaller in size than the American economy, it was a burden. But one cannot agree with the statement that the arms race played the key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
-
We are all passengers aboard one ship, the Earth, and we must not allow it to be wrecked. There will be no second Noah's Ark.
-
A New World Order is required to deal with the Climate Change crisis.
-
Women prevent the threads of life from being broken. The finest minds have always understood the peacemaking role of women.
-
We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.
-
When future generations judge those who came before them on environmental issues, they may conclude "they didn't know": let us not go down in history as the generations who knew, but didn't care
-
To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
-
Communist ideology in its pure form is akin to Christianity. Its main ideas are the brotherhood of all peoples irrespective of their nationality, justice and equality, peace, and an end to all hostility between peoples.
-
The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.
-
In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.
-
Globalization was supposed to break down barriers between continents and bring all peoples together. But what kind of globalization do we have with over one billion people on the planet not having safe water to drink?
-
The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.
-
Sometimes its difficult to accept, to recognise ones own mistakes, but one must do it. I was guilty of overconfidence and arrogance, and I was punished for that.
-
Though representatives of many ethnic groups came together in the United States, English became their common language. Apparently, this was a natural choice. One can imagine what would have happened if members of each nation moving to the U.S. had spoken only their own tongues and refused to learn English.
-
Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.
-
We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them. The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. Every US president has to have a war.
-
On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them: 'You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.'
-
I support freedom and I support a free market economy, but it should be a socially oriented market economy. I support globalization, but it should be globalization with a human face.
-
Montreal, this wonderful town… Pearl of Canada, Pearl of the world.
-
Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.
-
Political leaders still think things can be done through force, but that cannot solve terrorism. Backwardness is the breeding ground of terror, and that is what we have to fight.
-
It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.