Garry Kasparov Thinking Quotations

I'm still number one and I just recently won a major tournament ahead of my toughest rivals so I think I had a few years ahead of me if I decided to stay.

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

I think we have very steady records of President Putin, who inherited the country with democratic values.

I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it's not a western invention.

We think about time as something not to waste, not as something to invest.

Like Dvoretsky, I think that (all other things being equal), the analytical method of studying chess must give you a colossal advantage over the chess pragmatist, and that there can be no certainty in chess without analysis. I personally acquired these views from my sessions with Mikhail Botvinnik, and they laid the foundations of my chess-playing life.

I wouldn't place much stock in numbers. I don't believe that they reflect Putin's true popularity. Just think about how the pollsters proceed. They call people and they ask them questions on the street. In today's Russia, it takes a lot of courage to tell a stranger something critical about the head of the Kremlin. And yet more than 20 percent do so nonetheless.