Garry Kasparov > Quotes

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

“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.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“There is no one that can share your responsibility. It it is your responsibility you must carry it on and you must be responsible for your actions. At the end of the day we all are being challenged, sooner or later, by our destiny. And it's up to us to make all the difference in this life. If not you, who else?”
― Garry Kasparov

“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.”
― Garry Kasparov

“Somehow, people always forget that it's much easier to install a dictator than to remove one”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Focusing on your strengths is required for peak performance, but improving your weaknesses has the potential for the greatest gains. This is true for athletes, executives, and entire companies. Leaving your comfort zone involves risk, however, and when you are already doing well the temptation to stick with the status quo can be overwhelming, leading to stagnation.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“I used to attack because it was the only thing I knew. Now I attack because I know it works.”
― Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom

“In chess we have the obligation to move; there is no option to skip a turn if you can’t identify a direction that suits you. One of the great challenges of the game is how to make progress when there are no obvious moves, when action is required, not reaction. The great Polish chess master and wit Tartakower half-joking called this the “nothing to do” phase of the game. In reality, it is here that we find what separates pretenders from contenders.”
― Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom

“History does not end; it runs in cycles. The failure to defend Ukraine today is the failure of the Allies to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world must act now so that Poland in 2015 will not be called on to play the role of Poland in 1939.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“The reality is that most consumers in the developed world would rather not know where their phones and gas come from as long as the prices are low. If you know, you must act, so it is better not to know. The occasional scandal over inhuman working conditions in Chinese factories (or women’s rights in Saudi Arabia) allows some liberals to feel better when a Nike or Apple announces an investigation that is quickly forgotten by the time the next shoe or gadget comes out.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Sometimes the best defence is the best defence.”
― Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom

“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.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“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.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.”
― Garry Kasparov

“Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.”
― Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom

“I have written about what I call “the gravity of past success” in chess. Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Meanwhile, the loser knows that he made a mistake, that something went wrong, and he will work hard to improve for next time. The happy winner often assumes he won simply because he is great. Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake. It takes tremendous discipline to overcome this tendency and to learn lessons from a victory.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“In 1987, Gorbachev said he wanted to build Alexander Dubček’s “socialism with a human face,” to which I responded that Frankenstein’s monster also had a human face. Communism goes against human nature and can only be sustained by totalitarian repression.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“In "Anatomy of Fascism," Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Putinism “the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism” and “the coup de grâce” to the head of the Russian nation.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“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.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“Dictatorships must be feared to survive so they cannot bear to be mocked.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“But the worries about operatorless elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars.”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“If you program a machine, you know what it’s capable of. If the machine is programming itself, who knows what it might do? The”
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

“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.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped

“It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped