If you wish to succeed, you must brave the risk of failure.

The handover of power to [Dmitry] Medvedev was rather painless, everybody thought that the waves would calm automatically. By now, it's quite clear that [Vladimir] Putin doesn't want to relinquish the levers of power.

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

The sanctions and travel restrictions would have to be far more comprehensive to be truly painful for [Vladimir] Putin and his inner circle. And the new middle class should also feel the effects of what he is doing. For instance, we should ask those who wish to enter the EU whether they have visited illegally occupied Crimea in the last few months and, if the answer is "yes," deny them a visa.

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.

Without a goal [maneuvering is] aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you'll have no sense of strategy.

The stock market and the gridiron and the battlefield aren't as tidy as the chessboard, but in all of them, a single, simple rule holds true: make good decisions and you'll succeed; make bad ones and you'll fail.