Garry Kasparov Quotes

There is nothing wrong with this country that a good election can’t fix.

For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable.

I am happy that Poland is returning to the road of pluralism and democracy.

I have a lot of hope for the Constituent Assembly.

Any politician in a democracy has to be mindful of public opinion.

We did not have a revolution in order to have a democracy.

The great obstacle in the way of reform is neither American nor English, it is simply human. All that we know, by past experience, of the attempts of man to provide himself with a government, makes it most unlikely that an effort, repeated every four years, on the part of one hundred millions of people, to elect a single officer as the chief of state, should succeed. It seemed reasonable enough when the Constitution was framed for 3,000,000 people, leading a simple agricultural life. All democracies of which the world has had any experience, have been small … Our desire to create a ‘world Power’ out of the Federal machine is a fiasco, full of shame and disappointment.

Because all of us believe that our democratic form of government can cope adequately with modern problems as they arise, it is patriotic as well as logical for us to prove that we can meet new national needs with new laws consistent with a historic constitutional framework clearly intended to receive liberal and not narrow interpretation.

Every single election in every country has a component of a referendum in it.

There is no Left and Right any more. Left and Right is irrelevant... We need big change. We've got to get back control of our country.

Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress.

I do not support Putin against Europe. This is a caricature. I support a federalist Ukraine. The EU poured fuel on the fire by proposing an economic partnership to a country known to look half to the East and half to the West.

The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we’ve changed this country before.

The elections are the greatest symbol of participation and political reform.

It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, for the few, and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.

If we don't get reform in campaign financing, then we can write this country off.

That is, I think that what I do, that democracy in Venezuela hasn't really worked well since the [Ugo] Chávez era and that it has gotten even worse since the last elections, in which the Maduro government lost control of the House, of the country's legislature.

But in this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That's the finest asset we've got - the ballot box.

Burma is not yet a full-fledged democracy. We have started working on the road to full democracy. We have a lot of things to do in order to build a democratic structure and to be become a full-fledged democracy.

When I saw how the European Union was developing, it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don't like it you can change it.

I'm also very much aware that it is you who brought democracy to Chile, you set up a constitution suitable for democracy, you put it into effect, elections were held, and then, in accordance with the result, you stepped down.

We are not seeking revolution. We just want democracy.

EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.

We have got to go and compete for the minds and the hearts and the votes of everybody in this country, no matter who they are. And what I think we've had is one party takes a group of people for granted and another party has not paid attention to them.

If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.