A Quote by Mikhail Kalashnikov

For years, I had a top secret clearance and never left Russia. Just once did I go to Bulgaria with my wife for a holiday at the Golden Sands resort, but I could not mention my real name. I was allowed to travel abroad only in the early 1990s.
In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.
I'm not in those top secret meetings, nor would it be appropriate - the president can't tell me what's hap - what's being said in a top secret meeting unless I have top secret clearance. I will eventually be in those meetings.
Yeah, I had top-secret clearance and everything.
I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.
I never wanted to write about Bulgaria. When I was still living there I did my absolute best to never write a story with a Bulgarian character with a Bulgarian name, and only after I came to the US and I was far away and missing it a great deal did I realize that writing about could be my way of returning back home. I think it was only through my writing that I fell in love with the country and with the history.
I will work for Bulgaria's strategic choice - Bulgaria's membership in the European Union and NATO. I think it is also extremely important to revive Bulgaria's relations with Russia, Ukraine and other strategic partners.
Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you.
So let's not pretend that travel is always fun. We don't spend 10 hours lost in the Louvre because we like it, and the view from the top of Machu Picchu probably doesn't make up for the hassle of lost luggage. (More often than not, I need a holiday after my holiday.) We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.
I had top-secret clearance and everything. I was working on a couple of projects that would keep me involved in Desert Storm. I was in the mix, which is scary.
I held top-secret security clearance.
During holiday parties when people used to ask me what I did for a living, I would tell them I sold resort timeshares. That was an effective conversational nonstarter, until I met someone that actually did sell resort timeshares.
I got a top-secret security clearance and served in the CIA.
My first ever job after college was as a flight attendant. I wanted to travel and could not afford it, so I decided to get myself a job where I could travel. I did it for two years and had great fun.
The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
We didn't travel much when I was little - most of what we did was visit various campsites around Conway, north Wales. My first major holiday abroad was to Ibiza with my parents when I was five. I vividly remember the plane touching down and that the hotel had great swings with lots of little lizards darting about that I was determined to catch.
I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying. I once saw something fascinating here in New York. It must have been in the early seventies--guru time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park, wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat. He'd appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It's as easy as that.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!