I think the United States is sick. It suffers from the sickness, the disease of being the victor and it needs to cure itself from this disease.

When I cleared out Moscow apartment after stepping down as president, they found all kinds of wiring in the walls. It turned out that they had been spying on me all along.

To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.

Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.

We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.

It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.

My goal was to avoid bloodshed. But unfortunately there was some bloodshed, after all.