The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

Even paranoid people have enemies.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

One thing I don't want around me is a military intellectual. I don't have to worry about you on that score.

I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.

An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.

The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.