Mikhail Khodorkovsky Quotes

#1. 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

#2. My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a production engineer.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#3. I established my bank in 1988.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#4. To admit guilt for nonexistent crimes is unacceptable to me.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#5. The structure of the company is constantly changing. The composition of the necessary working groups is constantly changing. We have many divisions that are based on the project principle, which means that they are put together for each project.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#6. This is what happens with a breakthrough. The first ones through the door often get bruised if not broken. Eventually, with a little political acumen and racial sensitivity and a lot of hard work, a smooth new place can emerge.

Gwen Ifill

#7. I have to travel a lot, but relaxation to me is when I am at home.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#8. This demonstration of power, indifferent to the law, is highly dangerous.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#9. Don't say pussy in church, motherfucker."
"Oh yeah? Because motherfucker is better?

Harper Sloan

#10. Living this long's not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky.

Terry Pratchett

#11. Large companies cannot finance political parties as their shareholders and employees have different political views.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#12. I have always defended my convictions and what I believed to be the truth.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#13. Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#14. I need music like I need water.

Amy Grant

#15. My parents were Muscovites. They worked at the Kaliber factory.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#16. I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#17. Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.

Steven Pinker

#18. Today, a skilled manager makes more than the owner. And owners fight each other to get the skilled managers.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#19. The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#20. As for the company, I did all I could from the very outset of this affair to remove Yukos and its employees from danger.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#21. Incarceration didn't change me. In many ways, incarceration galvanized me. The totality of the experience helped me.

Roger Avary

#22. It kept him from reaching that place that he hit so, so often in his life, the mind-bending, sob-inducing limit where he said to himself, I just cannot endure any more motherfucking death. No more! Order. Put everything in order. Serve order. That was the why and what of it. Order.

Christopher Moore

#23. I like everything to be dependable, heavy, English furniture.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#24. Would it be better to have a president who cries easily? Well, that depends on what he cried about. I would not like the thought of a president who could not cry. That would be worse than one who cried over the right things. Which, in this case, would be the things I would cry over.

Walter Cronkite

#25. What's important to me now is to uphold my good name and achieve a fair court decision - the past cannot be recovered anyway.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#26. A left turn in the fate of Russia is as necessary as it is inevitable.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#27. We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

Tony Robbins

#28. Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#29. I'm not an ordinary prisoner.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#30. Russia on its path has oftentimes discussed and overdiscussed what had happened earlier, instead of moving forward. The result is always the same: It is very difficult to move forward when you're looking backward.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky