Garry Kasparov Quotes

The NSA is to the Stasi what a bad hotel is to a maximum security prison.

Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further.

My nature is that I have to excite myself with a big challenge.

[C]hess is not a game for dictators for numerous reasons. One, it's transparent. It’s all information hundred percent available so you know exactly what you have, you know exactly what your opponent has. You don’t know what he or she is thinking, but you definitely know what kind of resources your opponent can use to hurt you, to damage your position. Also, chess is very much a strategic game so you have to think long-term. Dictators don’t think long-term. Dictators, especially who are in power for so long as Putin is, they have to work on the survival mode. Because it’s all about today, maybe tomorrow morning. Everything that helps us survive is good. Because the moment the dictator thinks long-term, he’ll definitely miss guys from his own entourage hitting him in his own back. The game that defines dictators much better is poker because it’s about bluffs. It doesn’t matter whether you have a strong hand or weak hand. You can have a weak hand, but if you’re comfortable bluffing, raising stakes, and if you can read your opponent.

Everyone who told me a decade ago I was wrong, now is telling I'm right. Unfortunately. But we're still repeating the same mistakes of thinking that we can muddle through without taking risks, without taking a stand. The price of stopping a dictator always goes up with every delay, every hesitation. Meeting evil halfway, it's still a victory for evil.

It’s still unfathomable that Russia went from joyously celebrating the end of totalitarianism to electing a KGB lieutenant-colonel in just nine years. Never take your liberty for granted, and be careful whom you vote for because it may be the last election you’ll ever have.

Having spent a lifetime analyzing the game of chess and comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind, and are then refined and improved by experience.

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.

Putin's war on Ukraine has entered its next phase, one of destruction and slaughter of civilians. It is also a part of Putin's World War, a war on the civilized world of international law, democracy, and any threat to his power, which he declared long ago.

I regularly say in my lectures on artificial intelligence that humans will always have a monopoly on evil. It's not a threat, just a reminder that people choose. We are not algorithms. We are not bound by code or commandments or laws or treaties. We have them. But we choose. So let us talk now about the choices we make. About things in black and white. About Russia's war on Ukraine. And about good and evil.

Once the move is made you cannot change it. Acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past, but do not pretend it can be fixed. It's the present that must be fixed. The heroes of the past were far from perfect. But the world we live in is better because of them. We too cannot be perfect. But we must always try to be better.

I like to say that the attacker always has the advantage.

So what’s happened since ’92, it’s where the administrations that changed quite dramatically, the foreign policy, and it was working more like pendulum, swinging from one side to the other. Clinton did very little, W did too much, Obama has been doing nothing. It sent a message – sent numerous messages across the world. While people knew in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s that America was there, America was consistent. Even if you have a change in the Oval Office, one party replaces another, you could rely on the United States. America was behind American allies. Today? It’s probably, it’s a springtime to be an American enemy because this administration gives up everything to the enemies and betrays allies. And going back to George W. administration, it’s very popular to criticize Bush today, Bush 43. Especially for the Iraq invasion, and I’ve heard many voices, even within the Republican Party, it’s just floating with the popular trend. First of all, I have to say as somebody who was born and raised in a Communist country, I cannot criticize any action that led to the destruction of dictatorship. I think his people had wrong expectations. When they saw the collapse of Saddam’s dictatorship after American invasion of Iraq and then the collapse of a few other dictatorships during the Arab Spring, they had expectations that next day, it would be a democracy. It’s wrong. It was very naive because dictators succeeds the staying in power for so many years, not because he’s a nice guy, just helps his people to get out of poverty, but because he’s brutal, he’s cruel. He succeeds in destroying opposition, first political opposition and then freedom of press and remaining horizontal ties in the society. All the NGOs, anything that could represent not just a threat to him, but it’s any sort of the slightest dissent. It’s kind of a political desert. What do you expect in a desert after 10, 20, 30 – in the case of Gaddafi, 42 years of dictatorship?

Ukraine is now on the front line of the war — global war — of freedom against tyranny. The war the free world didn't want to admit existed. It cannot be ignored any longer. Brave Ukrainians are fighting like hell and dying right now to remind us not to take liberty for granted. Putin, like every dictator before him, underestimated the free will of free people. They deserve every weapon, every resource to win this war. Because they're fighting for us. Not only for the whole and free Ukraine.

Let’s move on to the next major lie in my opening statement, the idea of Putin’s popularity in Russia. I could not begin to count the number of times I’ve been forced to address this myth, the persistence of which I again attribute to our lack of language to describe modern dictatorships. Terms like “polls” and “popularity” as applied to politicians in the free world have very different meanings in authoritarian regimes. I’m fond of asking in response to questions about Putin’s “popularity” if a restaurant is popular if it’s the only one in town and every other restaurant was burned to the ground.