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 deca… - Mikhail Gorbachev

Some of my critics reproach me to this day for not having insisted on a legally binding stipulation [in 1990] that would have prevented NATO from expanding into Eastern Europe in the future. But such a demand would have been absurd, even preposterous, because the Warsaw Pact still existed at the time. We would have been accused of destroying it with our own hands.

For all the contradictions of the present-day world, for all the diversity of social and political systems in it, and for all the different choices made by the nations in different times, this world is nevertheless one whole. We are all passengers aboard one ship, the Earth, and we must not allow it to be wrecked. There will be no second Noah's Ark.

The Soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.