Moscow is simply unwilling to recognize the right of self-determination of nations.
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.
The Kremlin is constantly changing the rules of the game to suit its purposes. We are not playing chess, we’re playing roulette.
I don’t really like discussions about a supposed Russian national character.
I now have Croatian citizenship, but I only accepted it because Croatia allowed me to keep my Russian passport.
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
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.
Somehow, people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.
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.
Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake.
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.
Sometimes the best defence is the best defence.
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.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights.
One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one’s enemies.
The machines have finally come for the white collared, the college graduates, the decision makers. And it’s about time. J.
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.
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.
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.
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.