Top 160 Garry Kasparov Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.”

— Garry Kasparov

52. “I’m not paranoid, but I am cautious. I don’t drink tea with strangers, I don’t fly Aeroflot and I avoid certain countries with close ties to Russia.”

— Garry Kasparov

53. “The only way to fail for me is just not to try.”

— Garry Kasparov

54. “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.”

— Garry Kasparov

55. “The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.”

— Garry Kasparov

56. “Weaknesses of character are normally shown in a game of chess.”

— Garry Kasparov

57. “The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play.”

— Garry Kasparov

58. “In conclusion, if you want to unravel the multitude of secrets of chess then don’t begrudge the time.”

— Garry Kasparov

59. “In chess we have the obligation to move; there is no option to skip a turn if you can’t identify a direction that suits you. One of the great challenges of the game is how to make progress when there are no obvious moves, when action is required, not reaction. The great Polish chess master and wit Tartakower half-joking called this the “nothing to do” phase of the game. In reality, it is here that we find what separates pretenders from contenders.”

— Garry Kasparov

60. “The method you employ to achieve success is a secret because it can be discovered only by you analyzing your own decisions. This is what my questioners should really have been asking me about instead of my trivial habits: How did I push myself? What questions did I ask myself? How did I investigate and understand my strengths and weaknesses? And how did I use what I learned to get better and further define and hone my method?”

— Garry Kasparov

61. “Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles.”

— Garry Kasparov

62. “My opponent is Short and the match will be short.”

— Garry Kasparov

63. “Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.”

— Garry Kasparov

64. “Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.”

— Garry Kasparov

65. “Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook.”

— Garry Kasparov

66. “If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights.”

— Garry Kasparov

67. “Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn’t want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.”

— Garry Kasparov

68. “By strictly observing Botvinnik’s rule regarding the thorough analysis of one’s own games, with the years I have come to realize that this provides the foundation for the continuous development of chess mastery.”

— Garry Kasparov

69. “There can be no finer example of the inspiring powers of competition to shatter the status quo than Hungary’s Judit Polgar.”

— Garry Kasparov

70. “Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.”

— Garry Kasparov

71. “Vladimir Putin has this animalistic instinct of all dictators: He smells weakness. To quote Winston Churchill’s definition of appeasement: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.””

— Garry Kasparov

72. “You can’t overestimate the importance of psychology in chess, and as much as some players try to downplay it, I believe that winning requires a constant and strong psychology not just at the board but in every aspect of your life.”

— Garry Kasparov

73. “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.”

— Garry Kasparov

74. “With this mistake I deprived myself of the possibility to make a contribution to the treasury of chess art.”

— Garry Kasparov

75. “I have great energy and I have great tasks ahead of me.”

— Garry Kasparov

76. “When you say politics, you conjure a whole bunch of associations: elections, campaigning, debates, fundraising. None of this exists in Russia! We are still fighting not for election victories but for having elections at all.”

— Garry Kasparov

77. “I started playing chess when I was five years old. I learned the moves from my mother, then worked with my father – and later trainers. My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I’d forget about my other pieces.”

— Garry Kasparov

78. “The biggest problem I see among people who want to excel in chess – and in business and in life in general – is not trusting their instincts enough.”

— Garry Kasparov

79. “It was not about losing my mental power; it’s about not feeling good about my contribution to the game.”

— Garry Kasparov

80. “In “Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”

— Garry Kasparov

81. “We’ve been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn’t care about the law.”

— Garry Kasparov

82. “The Russian Dept of Tourism has declared Ukraine its most dangerous destination. Many Russian tourists have disappeared there.”

— Garry Kasparov

83. “Sometimes the best defence is the best defence.”

— Garry Kasparov

84. “Solving new problems is what keeps us moving forward as individuals and as a society, so don’t back down.”

— Garry Kasparov

85. “In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess – Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer – were born in America.”

— Garry Kasparov

86. “If you’re already in a fight, you want the first blow to be the last and you had better be the one to throw it.”

— Garry Kasparov

87. “I’m looking forward to the day when my country is saved – and the current winner becomes a loser.”

— Garry Kasparov

88. “If you program a machine, you know what it’s capable of. If the machine is programming itself, who knows what it might do? The.”

— Garry Kasparov

89. “Millions like me in Russia want a free press, the rule of law, social justice, and free and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for these fundamental rights.”

— Garry Kasparov

90. “The phrase “it’s better to be lucky than good” must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.”

— Garry Kasparov

91. “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.”

— Garry Kasparov

92. “Vladimir Putin uses fascist propaganda to do so. From Ukraine to Syria, he is behaving like the world’s new general and celebrating victories, while the American president sits on the sidelines and Europe sleeps. The West’s behavior toward Putin is political and moral capitulation.”

— Garry Kasparov

93. “Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.”

— Garry Kasparov

94. “But evil does not die, just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but never entirely uprooted. It waits for its chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It can take root in the fertile soil of our complacency, or even the rocky rubble of the fallen Berlin Wall.”

— Garry Kasparov

95. “Somehow, people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.”

— Garry Kasparov

96. “Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.”

— Garry Kasparov

97. “We have to stop the propaganda, the shameful propaganda used by Kremlin to rehabilitate these old types.”

— Garry Kasparov

98. “Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.”

— Garry Kasparov

99. “I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer.”

— Garry Kasparov

100. “Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.”

— Garry Kasparov