Top 15 Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.

I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature.

Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.

I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

Americans have a severe disease — worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.

One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.

Life is much richer and more complex than even the most perfect plans to make it better. It ultimately takes vengeance for attempts to impose abstract schemes, even with the best of intentions. Perestroika has made us understand this about our past, and the actual experience of recent years has taught us to reckon with the most general laws of civilization.

"We have retreated from the perennial values. I don't think that we need any new values. The most important thing is to try to revive the universally known values from which we have retreated.
As a young man, I really took to heart the Communist ideals. A young soul certainly cannot reject things like justice and equality. These were the goals proclaimed by the Communists. But in reality that terrible Communist experiment brought about repression of human dignity. Violence was used in order to impose that model on society. In the name of Communism we abandoned basic human values. So when I came to power in Russia I started to restore those values; values of "openness" and freedom."

History teaches us, however, that when the times are ripe for change and the government refuses or is unable to change, either society starts to decay or a revolution begins.

If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward.

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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize: “Violence has no way to conceal itself except by lies, and lies have no way to maintain themselves except through violence. Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

I have long ago made a final and irrevocable decision. Nothing and no one, no pressure, cither from the right or from the left, will make me abandon the positions of perestroika and new thinking. I do not intend to change my views or convictions. My choice is a final one.

You shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet, especially from sites that can be edited by anyone with a working email address.