Top 160 Garry Kasparov Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It’s quite difficult for me to imagine my life without chess.”

— Garry Kasparov

152. “It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.”

— Garry Kasparov

153. “It didn’t take long to recognise the shortcomings of the Soviet regime and to see the values of the free world.”

— Garry Kasparov

154. “I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.”

— Garry Kasparov

155. “I don’t really like discussions about a supposed Russian national character.”

— Garry Kasparov

156. “Putin recognized that if he could get enough money, everything would be under control.”

— Garry Kasparov

157. “I may play some exhibition games so I don’t want to quit the game of chess completely. I just decided and it’s a firm decision not to play competitive chess anymore.”

— Garry Kasparov

158. “Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake.”

— Garry Kasparov

159. “Do as little as necessary to appear to be doing something without actually committing to a cause or course of action.”

— Garry Kasparov

160. “I’m a firm a believer in the power of free enterprise to move the world forward. All that Soviet respect for science was no match for the American innovation machine once unleashed. The problem comes when the government is inhibiting innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy. Trade wars and restrictive immigration regulations will limit America’s ability to attract the best and brightest minds, minds needed for this and every forthcoming Sputnik moment.”

— Garry Kasparov

161. “Moscow is simply unwilling to recognize the right of self-determination of nations.”

— Garry Kasparov

162. “Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself.”

— Garry Kasparov

163. “The West can’t come up with anything to deal with Moscow, except appeasement.”

— Garry Kasparov

164. “When I was preparing for one term’s work in the Botvinnik school I had to spend a lot of time on king and pawn endings. So when I came to a tricky position in my own games I knew the winning method.”

— Garry Kasparov

165. “But the worries about operatorless elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars.”

— Garry Kasparov

166. “Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world.”

— Garry Kasparov

167. “I think we have very steady records of President Putin, who inherited the country with democratic values.”

— Garry Kasparov

168. “I certainly want to be involved in politics and help shape the transition. I am in contact with regime critics who had to leave for the West. One of them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former businessman, who had to endure 10 years in a prison camp.”

— Garry Kasparov

169. “There are many ways of showing your protest and discontent without the actions of Kremlin.”

— Garry Kasparov

170. “When the Soviet sports authorities attacked me for wanting to retain my chess winnings, they condemned not only my disobedience, but my lack of socialist solidarity. For me to say that my neighbors in Baku should see my keeping the Mercedes I won in Germany as normal, healthy thinking was radical and subversive.”

— Garry Kasparov

171. “Dictatorships must be feared to survive so they cannot bear to be mocked.”

— Garry Kasparov

172. “Today our society places great emphasis on specialization and focus. Students used to go off to university with the idea of broadening themselves; now it has become a mostly vocational experience. Students use higher education as a means to develop a skill that will make them attractive to employers. We place so much emphasis on being good at what we do that we fail to realize that getting better at what we do might be best achieved by getting better at other – and wildly different – things.”

— Garry Kasparov

173. “I have some strategical vision, I could calculate some few moves ahead and I have an intellect that is badly missed in the country which is run by generals and colonels.”

— Garry Kasparov

174. “The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s.”

— Garry Kasparov

175. “To become good at anything you have to know how to apply basic principles. To become great at it, you have to know when to violate those principles. This isn’t only a theory; it’s also the story of my own battles against chess machines over two decades.”

— Garry Kasparov

176. “More and more people in my country recognise the dangers of having their governors appointed by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.”

— Garry Kasparov

177. “Why settle for thinking like a human if you can be a god.”

— Garry Kasparov

178. “Of course, if people do not want to do any work then it is better to start the game from a random position.”

— Garry Kasparov

179. “It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only 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