Chess Champion Quotes

#1. FIDE has decided against my participation in the 1975 World Chess Champion title.

Bobby Fischer

#2. I remember mentioning to friends back in 1938 that the world chess champion would be beaten by a computer in 50 years time. Today we know computers are not far from this goal.

Konrad Zuse

#3. Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'

Daniel Tammet

#4. I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt.

Eric Sykes

#5. Sienna Rivers, ex-nerd, undisputed reigning chess champion of the class of 09 and the proverbial all round wise-ass degenerate pain in your backside.

Ali Harper

#6. In so-called communist Romania, chess was held in high esteem, even if our champions were weaker than the Soviets. This game, this "sport of the mind," was at the time a better way to establish your reputation than literature.

Dumitru Tepeneag

#7. When you have a World Champion in your smartphone, the myth of the superior brainpower of human chess champions has lost its power.

Hans Ree

#8. In chess so much depends on opening theory, so the champions before the last century did not know as much as I do and other players do about opening theory. So if you just brought them back from the dead they wouldn't do well. They'd get bad openings.

Bobby Fischer

#9. Being the undisputed world champion is a relief. We instituted a unified chess title, I am the absolute world champion.

Viswanathan Anand

#10. In itself the title of world champion does not give any significicant advantages, if it is not acknowledged by the entire chess world, and a champion who does not have the chess world behind him is, in my view, a laughing-stock.

Emanuel Lasker

#11. When I started out playing chess as a kid I thought I should be world champion. As a kid you have no idea what that means and you only sort of picture it. It is hard to imagine that I waited all those years and it happened in a late stage of my career.

Viswanathan Anand

#12. For me right now I think being the world number one is a bigger deal than being the world champion because I think it shows better who plays the best chess. That sounds self-serving but I think it's also right.

Magnus Carlsen

#13. By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion

Garry Kasparov

#14. If, in our first match for the world champion's title, I had managed to make the score 6-0, there would have been no Kasparov as a good chess player at all.

Anatoly Karpov

#15. The first great chess players, including the world champion, got by perfectly well without constant coaches.

Anatoly Karpov

#16. One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.

Anatol Rapoport

#17. I was world champion. For me, chess is my life. It is everything.

Anatoly Karpov

#18. 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

#19. The system set up by F.I.D.E ... Insures that there will always be a Russian world champion ... The Russians arranged it that way.

Bobby Fischer

#20. I thought I was playing the world champion, not some 27-eyed monster who sees everything in all positions.

Tony Miles

#21. Sultan Khan had become champion of India at Indian chess and he learned the rules of our form of chess at a later date. The fact that even under such conditions he succeeded in becoming champion reveals a genius for chess which is nothing short of extraordinary.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#22. In my country, at that time, being a champion of chess was like being a King. At that time I was a King - and when you are King you feel a lot of responsibility, but there is nobody there to help you.

Boris Spassky

#23. Playing chess is more athletic than artistic. Champions are more concerned with victory than beauty: it's war with occasionally graceful kicks.

Jennifer Shahade

#24. One of the things that first attracted me to chess is that it brings you into contact with intelligent, civilized people - men of the stature of Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, who was my part-time coach.

Magnus Carlsen

#25. Carlsen came with a line that was not very theoretical, trying to challenge the World Champion to play chess. [ ... ] But Anand proved that even this obscure line is something he has studied before, and it was Carlsen that was set back.

Alejandro Ramirez