Mikhail Khodorkovsky Quotes
-
I am working in my office. I've got a boss who tells me what to do. He's got a boss who tells him what to do. And above him is another boss who probably is telling my boss in the same way - or my boss' boss in the same way what to do. In actuality, this is not the way things work. Management science says that that kind of a chain doesn't work more than three levels up.
-
People expect some kinds of decisions from Putin that will help them see their own future. A significant part of the people that he relies on are quite content with him telling them that nothing is going to change. But that part of the elite that does want to see some changes and improvements are going to expect him to, in his next term, bring Russia back into the club of the great powers.
-
A left turn in the fate of Russia is as necessary as it is inevitable.
-
And so, now things that are important are, for example, the upcoming elections. It's important that society demonstrate that it is not pretending that these elections are elections.
-
I like everything to be dependable, heavy, English furniture.
-
My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a production engineer.
-
Russia on its path has oftentimes discussed and overdiscussed what had happened earlier, instead of moving forward. The result is always the same: It is very difficult to move forward when you're looking backward.
-
What's important to me now is to uphold my good name and achieve a fair court decision - the past cannot be recovered anyway.
-
Large companies cannot finance political parties as their shareholders and employees have different political views.
-
I have to travel a lot, but relaxation to me is when I am at home.
-
The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.
-
To admit guilt for nonexistent crimes is unacceptable to me.
-
Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.
-
If we talk about changes of power in Russia, that has occurred several times in the past century. After Stalin came Khrushchev, who implemented his legacy quite radically, one could say. But there was no blood, nonetheless. After Brezhnev came Gorbachev. I'm not talking about the ones who were in power for only a short period of time. Gorbachev, too, left a very radical legacy.
-
Putin doesn't need Donbass (east Ukraine). He wants to determine the fate of the world at talks with a U.S. President, putin is dreaming of getting a deal with the United States about a new-old order for the world, when the world is split on zone of influence. When you cannot interfere in someone else's zone. Not even to mention internal politics.
-
Putin has an obvious problem. His country's economy is in stagnation. He needs to constantly be pointing a figure at who is at fault. America is at fault. He needs to show those fronts - those directions in which he is defeating America. In Syria, for example, in Syria, he is defeating America; not ISIS, he's defeating America.
-
Part of the people here are interested in the same thing that Putin is interested in: Putin wants to have America as an enemy. Part of Americans want to have Russia as an enemy. It's advantageous. The other part of the people are just ordinary people. And these people project onto big objects the kind of relations that they have with small objects in their everyday lives.
-
My parents were Muscovites. They worked at the Kaliber factory.
-
Today, a skilled manager makes more than the owner. And owners fight each other to get the skilled managers.
-
I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.
-
The structure of the company is constantly changing. The composition of the necessary working groups is constantly changing. We have many divisions that are based on the project principle, which means that they are put together for each project.
-
There are people who are at fault for one or another problem. These people are very avaricious and self-serving. They're not doing it just to do it; they're doing it for the money. That money, they keep here. When you say, "We're going to find these people, these guilty people, the ones who are not only breaking laws but are also hurting their own fellow country people," and you say, "We're going to punish them, specifically, that's a step in the right direction."
-
Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.
-
I have always defended my convictions and what I believed to be the truth.