Garry Kasparov Quotes

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

Solving new problems is what keeps us moving forward as individuals and as a society, so don't back down.

By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.

Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn't want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.

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.

My nature is that I have to excite myself with a big challenge.

If you're already in a fight, you want the first blow to be the last and you had better be the one to throw it.

Chess strength in general and chess strength in a specific match are by no means one and the same thing.

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport.

It's quite difficult for me to imagine my life without chess.

One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies

Values-oriented foreign policy of the free world would be much better, supported by the self-awareness of being on the right side of history.

Enormous self-belief, intuition, the ability to take a risk at a critical moment and go in for a very dangerous play with counter-chances for the opponent - it is precisely these qualities that distinguish great players.

Everyone, at any age, has talents that aren't fully developed-even those who reach the top of their profession.

I wouldn't overestimate the importance of my popularity in the country and abroad but at the end of the day it's not as important because I believe that my presence here could make some difference and it could encourage people.

There are many ways of showing your protest and discontent without the actions of Kremlin.

[Vladimir] Putin needs wars to legitimize his position.

When the Soviet sports authorities attacked me for wanting to retain my chess winnings, they condemned not only my disobedience, but my lack of socialist solidarity. For me to say that my neighbors in Baku should see my keeping the Mercedes I won in Germany as normal, healthy thinking was radical and subversive.

I've seen - both in myself and my competitors - how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities.

The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play.

Putin can't afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.

A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough.

Democracies get the leaders they deserve, as

When you consider that only an estimated 15 percent of the US population plays chess, its cultural prominence is extraordinary. It

I now have Croatian citizenship, but I only accepted it because Croatia allowed me to keep my Russian passport.

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

Putin is like Al Capone.

I'm not paranoid, but I am cautious. I don't drink tea with strangers, I don't fly Aeroflot and I avoid certain countries with close ties to Russia.

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

There is no doubt that Putin is responsible for this crime, whether or not he gave the order to commit the murder [of Boris Nemtsov] himself. Putin created the conditions and atmosphere that have made this kind of thing possible.

Losing can persuade you to change what doesn't need to be changed, and winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster.

Boris Vasilievich was the only top-class player of his generation who played gambits regularly and without fear ... Over a period of 30 years he did not lose a single game with the King's Gambit, and among those defeated were numerous strong players of all generations, from Averbakh, Bronstein and Fischer, to Seirawan.

Without a goal [maneuvering is] aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you'll have no sense of strategy.

It is better to have a bad plan than no plan.

As one Google Translate engineer put it, "when you go from 10,000 training examples to 10 billion training examples, it all starts to work. Data trumps everything.

If you make a decision to fight for future of your own country you have to consider all the consequences.

Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians..

There can be no finer example of the inspiring powers of competition to shatter the status quo than Hungary's Judit Polgar.

To become good at anything you have to know how to apply basic principles. To become great at it, you have to know when to violate those principles.

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 Kremlin is constantly changing the rules of the game to suit its purposes. We are not playing chess, we're playing roulette.

Any experienced player knows how a change in the character of the play influences your psychological mood.

Chess is mental torture.

When I was preparing for one term's work in the Botvinnik school I had to spend a lot of time on king and pawn endings. So when I came to a tricky position in my own games I knew the winning method.

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

You can't overestimate the importance of psychology in chess, and as much as some players try to downplay it, I believe that winning requires a constant and strong psychology not just at the board but in every aspect of your life.

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.

A moral foreign policy means your positions on certain matters are clear no matter what, and that you won't forget about them when it's convenient.

It is foolish to let down our defenses against an attack simply because we will be in the moral right should that attack come.

In chess the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin's Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed.

I try to play, always, beautiful games ... always I wanted to create masterpieces.

More and more people in my country recognise the dangers of having their governors appointed by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.

The Western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption. Speaking the truth now would mean confessing to many months of lies

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.

The only successor to President Putin is President Putin himself and we could of course dream about President Putin stepping down voluntarily and picking out successor which would be probably as bad as him.

Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself

But evil does not die, just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but never entirely uprooted. It waits for its chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It can take root in the fertile soil of our complacency, or even the rocky rubble of the fallen Berlin Wall.

This obligation to move can be a burden to a player without strategic vision.

What did disappear - or, at least, what faded dramatically - was the willingness of the free world to take a firm stand in support of the oppressed.

One does not succeed by sticking to convention.

Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union's seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world.

My mother lives in Moscow, and I would like to visit her. Now she always has to travel to Finland or a Baltic country to meet me. But I have to expect that my papers would be confiscated in Moscow immediately, and that they would harass my family. I can still have more impact in the West with my books and lectures.

I have some security that could protect me against provocations but of course there are more terrible actions that could not be stopped by any security.

One comforting thing about the Trump White House is that you aren't forced to choose between malice and incompetence.

The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.

Comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer.

All women are inferior to men.

The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin's

Chess is not dominoes

There are fixed rules in chess, and no one knows how the game will end.

Do as little as necessary to appear to be doing something without actually committing to a cause or course of action.

Perfectly correct chess exists only in theory.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

The Russian Dept of Tourism has declared Ukraine its most dangerous destination. Many Russian tourists have disappeared there.

I certainly want to be involved in politics and help shape the transition. I am in contact with regime critics who had to leave for the West. One of them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former businessman, who had to endure 10 years in a prison camp.

Few things are as psychologically brutal as chess.

the gravity of past success.

Tarrasch's 'dogmas' are not eternal truisms, but merely instructional material presented in an accessible and witty form, those necessary rudiments from which one can begin to grasp the secrets of chess ...

Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook.

Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.

Dictatorships must be feared to survive so they cannot bear to be mocked.

I would like to travel to my country again, to a country without a dictatorship, to a post-Putin Russia.

Moscow is simply unwilling to recognize the right of self-determination of nations.

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

It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.

I don't make any secret of the fact that I'm closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats. But even under a President Hillary Clinton, US foreign policy toward Moscow would probably be more critical and confrontational. I hope it isn't too late for that.

Weaknesses of character are normally shown in a game of chess.

I'm looking forward to the day when my country is saved - and the current winner becomes a loser.

Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim!

My love of dynamic complications often led me to avoid simplicity when perhaps it was the wisest choice.

The West can't come up with anything to deal with Moscow, except appeasement.

Millions like me in Russia want a free press, the rule of law, social justice, and free and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for these fundamental rights.

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

Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance.

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.

Ultimately, what separates a Winner from a Loser at the Grandmaster level is the Willingness to do the Unthinkable.

His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.