Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s.

I started like many young Russian people in the beginning of perestroika when it seemed that everything was possible.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

This government will mark a rupture from the previous one, because that is the wish of the French people.

It is given to Bristol in this election to wrench the parliamentary system away from its feudal origins, and pitchfork it kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

We have a devastated city and devastated souls ... The transition from communism to democracy proved to be a bomb that blew us up.

The voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve.

I am for the restoration of order, not for the restoration of the old order.

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

Government is on a collision course with the future

We’ve already decided to change. The question is: In which direction do we change, and from where do we start?

What are we going to do when the Wall comes down?

There is always room for understanding towards those who see the old ways crumbling. And today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it does, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders too.

The fact that the young, perceiving themselves at a turning point in history, do not feel at home in the society and wish to change it, is a sign of portentous changes and of the difficult travails within which a new humanity is born.

I worry that even those who want to reform are not quite sure how to go about it. There is so much to be done.

Mustafa Kemal's government was certainly authoritarian, but he had a saying which is profoundly true, I don't remember the exact words, but what he said was that I am a dictator so that there will never again be a dictator in Turkey, and I think that was right. He felt that there were certain changes which needed to be made. He wanted to make those changes, he felt they were essential.

Americans understand that the game is rigged, and they've had enough of it. They're ready to fight back. They want a Washington that works for them, i think that people are getting more engaged, politically, and they're seeing through a lot of the rhetoric that politicians have been throwing out there for a long time. They want to see some real change, and I think that's what we need to work on.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.

Change has come to America.

It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.

The time for change is now.