Top 160 Garry Kasparov Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “My love of dynamic complications often led me to avoid simplicity when perhaps it was the wisest choice.”

— Garry Kasparov

102. “It’s true that in chess as in politics, fund-raising and glad-handing matter.”

— Garry Kasparov

103. “I now have Croatian citizenship, but I only accepted it because Croatia allowed me to keep my Russian passport.”

— Garry Kasparov

104. “Values-oriented foreign policy of the free world would be much better, supported by the self-awareness of being on the right side of history.”

— Garry Kasparov

105. “Focusing on your strengths is required for peak performance, but improving your weaknesses has the potential for the greatest gains. This is true for athletes, executives, and entire companies. Leaving your comfort zone involves risk, however, and when you are already doing well the temptation to stick with the status quo can be overwhelming, leading to stagnation.”

— Garry Kasparov

106. “Big branches in the decision tree require extra caution. These are the forks in the road that leave us with no way back.”

— Garry Kasparov

107. “The Kremlin is constantly changing the rules of the game to suit its purposes. We are not playing chess, we’re playing roulette.”

— Garry Kasparov

108. “Any experienced player knows how a change in the character of the play influences your psychological mood.”

— Garry Kasparov

109. “Putin can’t afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.”

— Garry Kasparov

110. “Nowadays, a 13-year-old would probably know more than Bobby Fischer knew when he retired. They analyse all the moves and prepare themselves on their computers. But that doesn’t mean they are special.”

— Garry Kasparov

111. “If you make a decision to fight for future of your own country you have to consider all the consequences.”

— Garry Kasparov

112. “You cannot say, ‘Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!’ People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.”

— Garry Kasparov

113. “I would like to travel to my country again, to a country without a dictatorship, to a post-Putin Russia.”

— Garry Kasparov

114. “History does not end; it runs in cycles. The failure to defend Ukraine today is the failure of the Allies to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world must act now so that Poland in 2015 will not be called on to play the role of Poland in 1939.”

— Garry Kasparov

115. “All that now seems to stand between Nigel and the prospect of the world crown is the unfortunate fact that fate brought him into this world only two years after Kasparov.”

— Garry Kasparov

116. “In a 1959 speech in Indianapolis, John F. Kennedy famously observed that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. It turns out that this is not literally true.”

— Garry Kasparov

117. “Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.”

— Garry Kasparov

118. “We have to always look ahead enough moves to be well prepared, even for victory!”

— Garry Kasparov

119. “Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.”

— Garry Kasparov

120. “Thanks to the Polgars the adjective ‘men’s’ before events and the ‘affirmative action’ women’s titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms.”

— Garry Kasparov

121. “As one Google Translate engineer put it, “when you go from 10,000 training examples to 10 billion training examples, it all starts to work. Data trumps everything.”

— Garry Kasparov

122. “I like to say that the attacker always has the advantage.”

— Garry Kasparov

123. “Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you’re going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.”

— Garry Kasparov

124. “Vladimir Putin mainly has friends in Europe among the extreme right, such as Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France.”

— Garry Kasparov

125. “Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance.”

— Garry Kasparov

126. “The technical phase can be boring because there is little opportunity for creavivity, for art. Boredom leads to complacency and mistakes.”

— Garry Kasparov

127. “I wouldn’t overestimate the importance of my popularity in the country and abroad but at the end of the day it’s not as important because I believe that my presence here could make some difference and it could encourage people.”

— Garry Kasparov

128. “Putin is like Al Capone.”

— Garry Kasparov

129. “One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one’s enemies.”

— Garry Kasparov

130. “I’m still number one and I just recently won a major tournament ahead of my toughest rivals so I think I had a few years ahead of me if I decided to stay.”

— Garry Kasparov

131. “I’ve met enough KGB colonels in my life.”

— Garry Kasparov

132. “The machines have finally come for the white collared, the college graduates, the decision makers. And it’s about time. J.”

— Garry Kasparov

133. “One comforting thing about the Trump White House is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence.”

— Garry Kasparov

134. “The real political life in Russia unfortunately is not in the parliament but on the streets and in the media.”

— Garry Kasparov

135. “There are many facts showing that Putin’s people enriched themselves by using power mechanisms so that’s why for them losing power means losing their fortunes.”

— Garry Kasparov

136. “Everyone, at any age, has talents that aren’t fully developed-even those who reach the top of their profession.”

— Garry Kasparov

137. “The only successor to President Putin is President Putin himself and we could of course dream about President Putin stepping down voluntarily and picking out successor which would be probably as bad as him.”

— Garry Kasparov

138. “A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.”

— Garry Kasparov

139. “I have some security that could protect me against provocations but of course there are more terrible actions that could not be stopped by any security.”

— Garry Kasparov

140. “His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.”

— Garry Kasparov

141. “I learned that fighting on the chess board could also have an impact on the political climate in the country.”

— Garry Kasparov

142. “I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it’s not a western invention.”

— Garry Kasparov

143. “Kortchnoi’s heritage is many-faceted – over the decades he has several times corrected and changed his style. But the main thing has invariably remained his search for chess truth.”

— Garry Kasparov

144. “Russian Parliament today is a bunch of puppets that just fall in with the instructions from Kremlin.”

— Garry Kasparov

145. “Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim!”

— Garry Kasparov

146. “We are living in a new ice age, and we need to apply the recipes of the Cold War to the Kremlin. That means isolation instead of offers of negotiation. And Ukraine should have been supplied with weapons long ago.”

— Garry Kasparov

147. “It could truly be the case that Vladimir Putin has miscalculated in the long term with his adventure in Syria.”

— Garry Kasparov

148. “I don’t make any secret of the fact that I’m closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats. But even under a President Hillary Clinton, US foreign policy toward Moscow would probably be more critical and confrontational. I hope it isn’t too late for that.”

— Garry Kasparov

149. “I dropped the King’s Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik.”

— Garry Kasparov

150. “I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.”

— Garry Kasparov