Top 789 Putin Quotes & Sayings - Page 10

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

In my opinion, this vicious circle will be broken by history itself. Because sticking to the current form of governance, which is to say guaranteeing the survival of [Vladimir] Putin's regime, will necessarily lead to the demise of Russia within its present borders.

I've always felt fine about Putin. I think he is a strong leader, he's a powerful leader, he's represented his country the way - the country is being represented.

George Bush looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul in the first meeting he had in Slovenia. And then in the next meeting, he realized his soul was very dark.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, populist uprisings had sprouted across Europe. Putin and his strategists sensed the beginnings of a larger uprising that could upend the Continent and make life uncomfortable for his geostrategic competitors.

Remember evil Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? He vanished for 10 days. He had disappeared and there were a lot of rumors. One rumor was he had disappeared because he had himself executed.

Mikheil Saakashvili can claim that 80 per cent of Georgians wanted to join NATO; on the other hand, a similar percentage of Russians would almost certainly support Putin's quest for a strong Russia. We would mistake this mood at our peril.

I think Republicans so mistrust Barack Obama, that if Barack Obama says Putin is terrible, they will be some Republicans who just take the other side.

Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat.

Russia - having sat across the table from Vladimir Putin, it's pretty clear when you meet him that he has an almost limitless ambition for power. And he's been very good at acquiring it - political power, economic power, military power, territorial power.

We know that Russian intelligence services, which is part of the Russian government which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC. And we know that he arranged for a lot of those emails to be released.

When it comes to trade, when it comes to standing up to countries like North Korea, when it comes to standing up to guys like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is not a conservative.

The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime.

Even if you have presidents like FDR dealing with someone like Stalin, with whom he didn't exactly all the time disagree... He wasn't always in lockstep saying Stalin was wonderful all the time. Donald Trump never criticizes Putin.

A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.

Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.

Donald Trump can say hey, did she [Hillary Clinton] short-circuit when she reset the relationship with Vladimir Putin and now Russia is, according to "The New York Times" article today, Russia is in control in Syria?

You've gotta understand what Putin's strategy is. He really doesn't like democracy. He thinks it's an inconvenient, messy process. And he doesn't like us, and he wants to destabilize our country; sow doubt about our democracy.

[Vladimir] Putin supporting Bashar al-Assad, helping with the Syrian refugee crisis and, I think for any republican, he [Donald Trump] has got to stop saying this, because I was with him. I was with him and he said that, it was like, I'm out. I'm out. It's too crazy.

In a sense, the central problem in U.S.-Russian relations has been a form of psychological projection. Putin views foreign policy as a means of enhancing Russia's - and his regime's - security, power and wealth in a zero-sum competition with other states. He assumes Americans are the same.

Russia is so feudal in its system of patronage and reward that it is virtually impossible for a leader to hand over power without controlling his successor or at least receiving an exemption from prosecution - something Mr. Putin granted his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1999.

In 2012, Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency after a four-year, constitutionally imposed hiatus. It wasn't the smoothest of transitions. To his surprise, in the run-up to his inauguration, protesters filled the streets of Moscow and other major cities to denounce his comeback.

I think Russia must have been very embarrassed by Syria's use of chemical weapons because it really undercut Putin's role back in 2013 in saying he had helped get rid of Syria's weapons.

The Democrat Party has had a friendly, supportive relationship with every communist regime on this planet in my lifetime. And now all of a sudden their buddies, the Soviets, i.e., Putin and the Russians, have abandoned them and are now sabotaging them for the purpose of election.

I'm not sure about whether Ukraine will ever be joining. As long as there's a frozen conflict on Ukrainian territory, they can't possibly join. And that's probably one of the reasons why Vladimir Putin is interested in having a frozen conflict there, so that there is no border security.

I think it is my big advantage that I know Putin personally... that he can trust me, that he can see in me a new generation. I want to be a person who really makes him see how many people are against the system.

If I meet Putin, I'll say to him: 'So you've finally given us back our territory, how much more are you ready to give as compensation money for taking away our land and helping those who took part in the escalation in Crimea and Donbass?'

The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced a campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump.

There are even a few [people] who still honestly believe I sold information to [Vladimir] Putin - like personally, in exchange for asylum. And this is after the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, who gets to read the NSA's reporting on my activities every morning, said all of these conspiracies are delusional.

Ronald Reagan is going to go into negotiations with [Vladimir] Putin from a position of strength. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave up the game on day one when they reset the relationship with Russia and they gave up the nuclear defense of Poland and the Czech Republic.

The Soviet Union was, by the 1970s and 1980s, relatively stable and predictable. Putin's Russia is much more volatile. Nuclear policy is really in the hands of one person, or a small group of people, instead of a huge party-state apparatus. The possibility of a mistake is greater now.

We are a Russian group and we want to change the situation in Russia. We criticize our own government and it would be strange if we did that from abroad. We don't need performances in the West to put Putin's regime under pressure. The punishments against us have shown us that we succeeded.

It will be very important for us to continue to keep up the necessary pressure, the necessary vigilance, for there to be peace in Ukraine, our trust in the goodwill of President (Vladimir) Putin is limited. It is why we have to maintain our decision about sanctions.

People often say that I represent people who earn a lot of money. Of course, a person who is well-educated and affluent is more likely to support me than Vladimir Putin. But that doesn't automatically mean that the others are against me.

If you wake up in Moscow and put on the Science channel, it doesn't feel like an American channel, it feels like their channel. In fact, Discovery is Vladimir Putin's favorite channel.

I don't keep a list of people I want to talk to. It's organic. But I'd like to interview Tom Brady. Someday I'd love to meet Vladimir Putin. I'd ask him how he sees the landscape of the world, what could make it better, how that could be done.

[Vladimir] Putin intended to provide for a broad safety corridor [for the Olympic Games]. That's why Abkhazia was a more important and desired goal of Russian aggression against Georgia than South Ossetia, which merely served as a pretext. Concerns mainly centered on the Crimea.

Vladimir Putin is infuriated by the Magnitsky case. Why is he infuriated by it? It's because he steals a lot of money himself. He ends up terrorizing people himself. And he keeps that money he's stolen offshore.

With Russia about to hold the Winter Games in Sochi, the country is open to pressure. American and world leaders must speak out against Mr. Putin's attacks and the violence they foster. The Olympic Committee must demand the retraction of these laws under threat of boycott.

If Vladimir Putin says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him.

Probably Putin assumes that he's not going to be able to make a deal with me because it's politically not popular for me to make a deal. So Hillary Clinton tries a re-set. It failed. They all tried. But I'm different than those people.

I think what we're seeing is that they're testing each other. Russia is testing us, we're testing them, it's part of just, you know, the new president Donald Trump coming in and President Vladimir Putin having to figure out his place.

Putin got lucky with the Sochi Olympics - it didn't fail, it was a great spectacle - and then he thought, "Why not grab Crimea?" And ended up getting stuck. If he had been a wise man, he wouldn't have done that. Of course, then he wouldn't have held the Olympics, either.

Putin has been - and with a lot of the groups, the conservative groups, the more extreme conservative groups that underlie Trump, he's a bit of a hero because he speaks for traditional values, he's against the global institutions.

I know Vladimir Putin. He respects strength. He lied to our president's [Barack Obama] face; didn't both to tell him about warplanes and troops going into Syria. We need to speak to him from a position of strength.

Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.

Our potential adversaries are watching us, and they have seen what has happened to us... This is why we're dealing with a very problematical and troublesome Putin, and we're dealing with Iran in a very terrible agreement we had.

Nicholas I has been called 'Genghis Khan with a telegraph.' Stalin was 'Genghis Khan with a telephone.' But Mr. Putin is not Genghis Khan with a BlackBerry.

We have to remember that Putin was a member of the KGB. He has already demonstrated that kind of macho, dictatorial attitude. Russia has breached their pledge to uphold the Olympic charter. This is a great opportunity for the IOC to say we cannot, given the situation that exists currently, allow the Olympics to take place in Russia.

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.

Trump himself has not laid out a clear agenda on the national security issues that are the most pressing for the United States, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the deepening Syrian civil war to the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin.

One thing you can say about Trump is that he is not a traditional patriarch. He has a wife who's not even in the White House. And you could say the same of Duterte in the Philippines and of Putin. They're parodies of masculinity. They're hyper-masculine, but they're also totally unsure of their masculinity, and they parade it around.

Hillary Clinton is actually telling her donors that Vladimir Putin targeted her personally because he's so afraid of her. We're dealing with some genuinely sick people here, folks, truly, I'm talking mentally ill. They're not all there. They pose a great danger.

There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.

Furthermore, the situation in the North Caucasus is rather unstable. Mutual relations and the cooperation between [Vladimir] Putin and [Ramzan] Kadyrov, the high price that has been paid to buy the loyalty of the local elite through an enormous tribute of multibillion[-ruble] investments, all this cannot be an arrangement for good.

Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.

I think Vladimir Putin, because of all of his experiences, has a real fear about being - about NATO being on his borders. He's always had that.

Putin likes to quote a sentence from Czar Alexander III, who said that Russian has only two allies - the army and the navy. As a citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice. This is a concept of self-imposed isolation, a defense strategy that sees Russia surrounded by enemies.

Putin has succeeded in many ways in making Russia an essential player there. He seems to have stabilized the Assad regime. And he has limited the options for the U.S. and its allies, you know. He has air control over a significant amount of territory. And he can prevent the allies from establishing a no-fly zone there.

We triggered a discussion in society about the connection between church and state as well as our justice system. Putin is the leader, the icon and the guarantor of an authoritarian system that crushes Kremlin critics along with the help of the secret police and ever changing methods and laws.