Winter Is Coming Quotes

“Somehow, people always forget that it's much easier to install a dictator than to remove one”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“History does not end; it runs in cycles. The failure to defend Ukraine today is the failure of the Allies to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world must act now so that Poland in 2015 will not be called on to play the role of Poland in 1939.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“The reality is that most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. If you know, you must act, so it is better not to know. The occasional scandal over inhuman working conditions in Chinese factories (or women’s rights in Saudi Arabia) allows some liberals to feel better when a Nike or Apple announces an investigation that is quickly forgotten by the time the next shoe or gadget comes out.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“But evil does not die, just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but never entirely uprooted. It waits for its chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It can take root in the fertile soil of our complacency, or even the rocky rubble of the fallen Berlin Wall.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“In 1987, Gorbachev said he wanted to build Alexander Dubček’s “socialism with a human face,” to which I responded that Frankenstein’s monster also had a human face. Communism goes against human nature and can only be sustained by totalitarian repression.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“I have written about what I call “the gravity of past success” in chess. Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Meanwhile, the loser knows that he made a mistake, that something went wrong, and he will work hard to improve for next time. The happy winner often assumes he won simply because he is great. Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake. It takes tremendous discipline to overcome this tendency and to learn lessons from a victory.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“In "Anatomy of Fascism," Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Dictatorships must be feared to survive so they cannot bear to be mocked.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Putinism “the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism” and “the coup de grâce” to the head of the Russian nation.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“When the Soviet sports authorities attacked me for wanting to retain my chess winnings, they condemned not only my disobedience, but my lack of socialist solidarity. For me to say that my neighbors in Baku should see my keeping the Mercedes I won in Germany as normal, healthy thinking was radical and subversive.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Putin’s Russia is clearly the biggest and most dangerous threat facing the world today, but it is not the only one. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are (despite the latter’s name) stateless and without the vast resources and weapons of mass destruction Putin has at his fingertips. The”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Ukraine is just one battle the free world would like to ignore in a larger war it refuses to acknowledge even exists. But pretending you don’t have enemies does not make it true. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union are gone, but the enemies of freedom who built them are not. History does not end; it runs in cycles. The failure to defend Ukraine today is the failure of the Allies to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world must act now so that Poland in 2015 will not be called on to play the role of Poland in 1939.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“A war on any grounds is terrible, but Putin’s dangerous turn to ethnically based imperialism cannot be ignored. Those who say the Ukraine conflict is far away and unlikely to lead to global instability miss the clear warning Putin has given us. There is no reason to believe his announced vision of a “Greater Russia” will end with Eastern Ukraine and many reasons to believe it will not. Dictators only stop when they are stopped, and appeasing Putin with Ukraine will only stoke his appetite for more conquests.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“experience has shown that you can often do just fine being on the wrong side of history if you are on the right side of a pipeline.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“includes in his concise definition “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“So while our ever-evolving opposition movement made some progress in drawing attention to the undemocratic reality of Putin’s Russia, we were in a losing position from the start. The Kremlin’s domination of the mass media and ruthless persecution of all opposition in civil society made it impossible to build any lasting momentum. Our mission was also sabotaged by democratic leaders embracing Putin on the world stage, providing him with the leadership credentials he so badly needed in the absence of valid elections in Russia. It is difficult to promote democratic reform when every television channel and every newspaper shows image after image of the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies accepting a dictator as part of their family. It sends the message that either he isn’t really a dictator at all or that democracy and individual freedom are nothing more than the bargaining chips Putin and his ilk always say they are. In the end, it took the invasion of Ukraine to finally get the G7 (I always refused to call it the G8) to expel Putin’s Russia from the elite club of industrial democracies.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“We have to build a values-based system that is robust enough to resist the virus at home, smart enough to stop it before it spreads, and bold enough to eradicate it where it grows.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats, by the way.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the streetlights.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Putin and his defenders abroad bragged about Russia’s rising GDP, but it was like taking the average temperature of all the patients in a hospital. According to the 2015 numbers, even after a year of Western sanctions and plunging oil prices, there are still eighty-eight Russian billionaires on the Forbes list, which still doesn’t list Putin or several of his closest cronies. I find it impossible to believe that a man like Putin who holds the power of life and death over eighty-eight billionaires is not the richest of them all. The occasional leaks about mysterious Black Sea mansions and enormous bank transfers to nowhere add more circumstantial evidence to the case that by now Putin is likely the richest man in the world.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“maybe they were right, but so was I.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“,,Комунизмът е като автоимунно заболяване,то не те убива само,но толкова отслабва организма,че жертвата остава безпомощна и неспособна да се справи с нищо.Той унищожава човешкия дух на ниво личност, извращава ценностите на успешното свободно общество.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped