Garry Kasparov

“At the end of the day, it's all about money.”

“You cannot say, 'Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!' People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.”

“The phrase "it's better to be lucky than good" must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.”

“I organize a chess festival in Hungary. I support chess in schools, and I have my own chess foundation. And I started writing books.”

“Russian Parliament today is a bunch of puppets that just fall in with the instructions from Kremlin.”

“There are many facts showing that Putin's people enriched themselves by using power mechanisms so that's why for them losing power means losing their fortunes.”

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

“The real political life in Russia unfortunately is not in the parliament but on the streets and in the media.”

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

“I may play some exhibition games so I don't want to quit the game of chess completely. I just decided and it's a firm decision not to play competitive chess anymore.”

“The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.”

“Putin is like Al Capone.”

“I think that it's a vital moment now for Russian democracy to convince people that it's only our actions, our joined actions and protests that could force Kremlin to reconsider its plans to abolish presidential elections.”

“Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment.”

“We have to stop the propaganda, the shameful propaganda used by Kremlin to rehabilitate these old types.”

“I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.”

“I have great energy and I have great tasks ahead of me.”

“It didn't take long to recognise the shortcomings of the Soviet regime and to see the values of the free world.”

“I started playing chess when I was five years old. I learned the moves from my mother, then worked with my father - and later trainers. My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces.”

“We've been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn't care about the law.”