The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.

The highest peace is the peace between opposites.

Detente is a readiness to resolve differences and conflicts not by force, not by threats and sabre-rattling, but by peaceful means, at the conference table.

It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war.

When the Soviet Union came to be run by a valetudinarian mafioso like Brezhnev, the thing itself had fallen into self-contempt.

Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends: The energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the minerals treasure house of Central and Southern Africa.

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today.

We Communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology.

Soviet people are better off materially and richer spiritually.

The most important thing in my life, its leitmotif, has been the constant and close contacts with working people, with workers and peasants.

Real strength isn’t control. It’s knowing when to let go.

It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.

I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won't in my sky every day...

I always like doing things that no one's ever done before. Doing things a little out of the ordinary.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

I'm desperate to have children. I am chomping at the bit. It's a problem. I can't imagine that I will not be a mother.

Make sure of two things. Be careful - microphones are always hot, and understand that in Washington, D.C., a gaffe is when you tell the truth. So, be careful.

As soon as I hear of a right, I want it.

Our memories are independent of our wills.