Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes
- All Quotes
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Dangers await only those who do not react to life.
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We have no right ever to forget that psychological warfare is a struggle for winning people's minds.
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It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.
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One of the reasons why this country undertook military action in Iraq was that there are quite a few problems here, and perhaps attention needed to be deflected from those problems. It sometimes seems that the U.S. economy works successfully only if it gets a stimulus from the defense industry. So perhaps in addition to showing the power and the might of the United States internationally, another reason was to help the defense industry and to help the U.S. economy recover.
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Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.
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The time has come to choose a new direction of global development, to opt for a new civilization.
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The social model of the Bolsheviks failed, as will any model that denies individual rights, intellectual freedom, and freedom of competing political parties. Without these freedoms and rights, there is no motivation for people to work. Such a system cannot be sustained, especially in light of the technological revolution of the information era.
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Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
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Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.
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Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they would want it back.
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The forests of Russia and Brazil are the lungs of the Earth.
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America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.
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Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.
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We could still have continued the arms race, but the arms race was pointless, and it was another reason we decided to start perestroika. It was senseless to continue to accumulate weapons. We had enough weapons to destroy life on Earth 1,000 times, and therefore it was very clear to us that the arms race could spiral out of control. A conflict could have started, as both the Americans and the Soviets realized, not out of a wrong political decision but because of a failure in the command-and-control systems.
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It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.
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According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.
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The socialist tradition....goes back to Jesus Christ, not (Karl) Marx.
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We need a new system of values, a system of the organic unity between humankind and nature and the ethic of global responsibility.
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It will be difficult, even painful, but democracy will prevail in Russia. There will be no dictatorship, although relapses into authoritarianism are possible.
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Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.
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The problem the world faces today is that only one-third of the world's population lives in decent circumstances, while half the population of the world lives on one or two dollars a day. And even as we have this poverty and backwardness, we are facing a global environmental crisis. We need developmental models that will take into account the specific and unique position of each country and at the same time will address the environmental crisis.
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Now that we are rid of this syndrome of imposing the communist model on people, now that we've given them the chance to get rid of this dogma, I have to tell you Americans that you've been pushing your American way of life for decades. You thought it was perfection itself, the ultimate achievement of human thought... There has to be a different approach... Americans have to be more modest in their desires. We have to stimulate human qualities in people rather than greed.
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We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people.
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America has a right to be a leader. This leadership should be realized through partnership, not domination.