You know, if I'm in a bad mood, I always look at the chessboard, just to find something that can cheer me up.

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.

Quite frankly, I have to admit that with regard to the enormous financial assets and funds of Russian leaders in Western banks and on stock markets, the chances for the West to exert influence on Russia are quite low. I doubt that Western leaders are willing to exert pressure. I would not exclude an intervention in case of a crisis.

We have again a strange gap. We have the big scientific discoveries around the second, third century BC. Then we have an invention of the so-called Arab system, the positional system of counting with zero dated to the eighth or ninth century.

That machines will surpass us in intelligence is inevitable. What it means is unknowable. Will they be sentient? What will they care about in the sense that determines our human motivations? All the theorizing by the experts and non-experts makes for interesting conversations and dramatic headlines, but it's more likely we will be surprised by how our technology develops and how it is used, as we so often are.

Putin is like Al Capone.

I'm not saying that George W. Bush did everything right. But even if you take a skeptical view of his Iraq war, [Barack] Obama made the more serious error of withdrawing his troops from Iraq early.