Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

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

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.

If not me, who? And if not now, when?

It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'

When future generations judge those who came before them on environmental issues, they may conclude "they didn't know": let us not go down in history as the generations who knew, but didn't care

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.

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.

You cannot go to sleep with one form of economic system and wake up the next morning with another.

The time has come to choose a new direction of global development, to opt for a new civilization.

It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

Those who are late will be punished by life itself.

It will be difficult, even painful, but democracy will prevail in Russia. There will be no dictatorship, although relapses into authoritarianism are possible.

Sometimes when you stand face to face with someone, you cannot see his face.

I say again that I am an atheist. I do not believe in God.

The forests of Russia and Brazil are the lungs of the Earth.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.

I think the United States is sick. It suffers from the sickness, the disease of being the victor and it needs to cure itself from this disease.

I began to feel the desire for something more; I wanted to do something to make things better.

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.

For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change. Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.

Political leaders still think things can be done through force, but that cannot solve terrorism. Backwardness is the breeding ground of terror, and that is what we have to fight.

I support freedom and I support a free market economy, but it should be a socially oriented market economy. I support globalization, but it should be globalization with a human face.

History punishes those that come late to it.

Without glasnost there is not, and there cannot be, democratism, the political creativity of the masses and their participation in management.

To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.

I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

The threat of environmental crisis is the 'international disaster key' to unlock the New World Order.

Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

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

Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

The shortage of fresh water is the major ecological problem of this moment.

The phenomenon of UFOs does exist, and it must be treated seriously.

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.

We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people.

Dangers await only those who do not react to life.

We have no right ever to forget that psychological warfare is a struggle for winning people's minds.

The model of the consumer society is something that will one day end. My personal view is that too much consumption is wrong.

More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life.

Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.

We need a new system of values, a system of the organic unity between humankind and nature and the ethic of global responsibility.

The threat of a world war is no more.

Politics is my second love, next to my love for Raisa [Gorbacheva].

Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

A society should never become like a pond with stagnant water, without movement. That's the most important thing.

Surely, God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement in relations between the two great nations on earth.