I said to myself, 'the champion of the whole world can whoop every man in Russia, every man in America, every man in China, every man in Japan, every man in Europe - every man in the whole world'.It sounds big, didn't it? So I kept working until I did it.
How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
There's going to have to be investigations, and an independent investigation, into the Trump campaign and the Trump administration's relationship to Russia.
A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia, should be separated, freed from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to Ireland, India and other possessions; and each should help to do this, because the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore, if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening, and help this forward with all our might.
On Syria, it's clear that the indiscriminate attacks on civilians by the [Bashar] Assad regime and Russia will only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe and that a negotiated end to the conflict is the only way to achieve lasting peace in Syria.
I commended Angela [Merkel] for her leadership along with President Hollande in working to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. We continued to stand with the people of Ukraine and for the basic principle that nations have a right to determine their own destiny and we discussed the importance of maintaining sanctions until Russia fully complies with the Minsk Agreement.
But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.
In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.
Russia's most precious resource is the brain power of this country. And you've got a lot of it. It's going to take a lot of brains in Russia to create a drain.
The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945)