Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes
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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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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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When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.
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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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Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.
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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.
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Dangers await only those who do not react to life.
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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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Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.
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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 socialist tradition....goes back to Jesus Christ, not (Karl) Marx.
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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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We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people.
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We must treat water as if it were the most precious thing in the world, the most valuable natural resource. Be economical with water! Don't waste it! We still have time to do something about this problem before it is too late.
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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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We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.
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America has a right to be a leader. This leadership should be realized through partnership, not domination.
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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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Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
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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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Please remember one lesson of the 20th century. One cannot force happiness, impose happiness on nations by imposing any kind of utopia on others. The Communist model of society was a kind of imposed utopia for which the Russian people in particular paid a great price. Still, sometimes we see that attempts are being made to impose some other kind of model on the entire world - maybe a Westernized or Americanized model... This is not the way to go because this can only create conflict.
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It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.
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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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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.