It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

Not only America but all countries should think together about how the enormous might of the sole remaining superpower should be used. We need a leadership that is based on partnership, a leadership that unites nations and makes it possible to solve the problems of the globe together. Otherwise, we will have another Gold Rush for a superpower that wants to gain even greater advantages, that wants to gain an absolutely new position for itself. That would lead to a perverse utopia.

Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.

New approaches are needed, new orientations in both thought and action. We must make the transition to a new civilization...We are talking of a transition toward a new civilization. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction... I am convinced that a new civilization will inevitably take on certain features that are characteristic of, or inherent in, the socialist ideal.

A new generation of more educated people started to be active. Then society required freedom, society demanded freedom.

We need a new system of values, a system of the organic unity between humankind and nature and the ethic of global responsibility.

The world's deteriorating ecology poses as great a danger to mankind today as did the nuclear standoff between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War.