By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.

I say we should praise Donald Trump for existing and for winning, because it has woken people up. For many years, I have been trying to say to Europeans, and especially to Americans, that Vladimir Putin is a problem for the world. And they have swatted me away. "It's your problem, we have our democracy." Suddenly, because of Trump, they are learning about separation of powers, independence of the judiciary and that Ronald Reagan was right when he said, «Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction».

Russian Parliament today is a bunch of puppets that just fall in with the instructions from Kremlin.

Many people think they are too refined, or too rational, to entertain a real sense of wonder in themselves or in others. This is preposterous to me, since the natural world is full of endless wonders, both on Earth and especially in space, no matter how you think it was created.

In Armenia, the power de facto belongs to those who opted to take violent action in Karabakh. We are dealing with a military dictatorship that utilizes some kind of democratic procedures.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

Dictatorships sometimes fall unexpectedly and quickly. And [Vladimir] Putin knows that for him, the loss of power doesn't mean a comfortable retirement, but something completely different.