Deux fous gagnent toujours, mais trois fous, non!

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.

The infallible criterion by which to distinguish the true from the would-be strategist is the degree of originality of his conceptions. It makes little difference whether this originality is carried to excess, as was the case with Steinitz and Nimzowitsch.

During a chess tournament a master must envisage himself as a cross between an ascetic monk and a beast of prey.

The fact that a player is very short of time is to my mind, as little to be considered as an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the time he committed the crime.

Deux fous gagnent toujours, mais trois fous, non!

Capablanca was snatched too early from the chess world. With his death we have lost a great chess genius, the like of whom we will never see again.