"My dream is chess played in every school in India. The Soviets would include a chessboard along with the bride’s trousseau to ensure that the children born of that marriage knew the rules of chess."

"I started at the age of six. My elder brother and sister were dabbling a bit, and then I went to my mother and pestered her to teach me as well."

"A [world title] match has that feeling much more strongly because it's the same guy doing it over and over and over … When you play a single person, it becomes narrower because you are so focused on each other. It is a lot more personal."

"You would have to sit at the board and sweat and feel the fear of defeat or the nearness of victory to understand what goes through a player's head … If you think it's that easy, switch off the computer and try and figure out a few moves on your own."

"To become a world chess champion."

"Since the 1990s technology has taken some of the sheen off the Russian trainers and their methods."

"Magnus has many good qualities... he is very versatile and he can play a lot of positions at a very high level. He's also very flexible. And he has this amazing talent for grinding on, as you say. So that combination I was unable to deal with."

"I wasn't expecting him to be a gracious, so fair enough. The winner can say anything when he wins... so I guess we will just have to swallow it for now."

"Whenever we see an unprotected piece we must keep our eyes peeled because this is one of the most important ingredients of a combination."

"We always say, one day we will laugh at this. I always try to make sure that this one day is today…"

"The choice of moves should not be made on an exact verdict of the final position, but on whether or not your position has improved or worsened."

"As the first (and only) African American International Grand Master, Maurice Ashley is an historical figure. He is also a superb writer and a compelling teacher who makes learning even the most difficult aspects of chess appear possible. He shows us how chess can be used to put our young people on the path to success."

"Chess improves strategic thinking, attention span, patience, camaraderie and sportsmanship. Maurice Ashley is not only an international grand master as a player but also as a teacher and activist."

"Maurice's street savvy gives him instant credibility with children of all ages. I never tire of watching a room full of kids who have absolutely no interest in chess light up as Maurice tells his story. His ideas change lives and needs to be heard. Invest in your child's future; buy this book today."

""Most amateurs hate Chess 960 because it makes them feel stupid, but most Grandmasters love it because it makes them feel like amateurs again. It’s a chance for the chess elite to explore brand new worlds of wonderment and discovery." — Twitter September 2022"

"Maurice is a born fighter; he’s tricky and aggressive. Maurice confidently contests the sharpest lines of any opening without worrying about whether his opponent will know it better or come up with a novelty. To earn the GM title, Maurice had to go past his natural talents and work hard on raising his positional and endgame play to the GM standard."

"Maurice Ashley has been like a brother to me since I was twelve years old. I know the man, I know the competitor, I know the artist, and I know the teacher."

"Maurice Ashley is not only a chess grandmaster, but he is a grandmaster at story-telling. He knows how to get to get kids hooked on the strategies and complexities of chess. In an age where kids too often play video games that are like junk food for the brain, Maurice is getting kids to sharpen their minds and build their character through the ancient game of chess."

"The chess world is officially a joke. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE IN HISTORY. I can’t believe that the official body of chess is being controlled by a singular player FOR THE 2ND TIME THIS WEEK. THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE WORLD CHAMPION!"

"I see myself more as an ambassador of the game. And I hope to bring chess to a higher level in the United States. Making bigger tournaments, more interesting events. Making it a respectable profession for young people to be able to pursue in the future."

"There's so many lessons I get from chess, it's incredible, but I think the biggest thing for me has always been is that losing is learning."

"I'm certainly somebody who hopes for more 960 in classical format because I feel like 960 is not that suited to rapid and blitz because you're just gonna play too poorly. You're just gonna have absolutely no clue, but if you actually have time to sit down and think for half an hour on your first five moves, then maybe you can get some more understanding of the game."

"I think in general the future of classical chess as it is now is a little bit dubious. I would love to see more Fischer [Random] Chess being played over-the-board in a classical format. That would be very interesting to me, because I feel that that particular format is pretty well suited to classical chess as basically you need a lot of time in order to be able to play the game even remotely decently. And you can see that in the way that Fischer [Random] Chess is being played now when it is played in a rapid format. The quality of the games isn't very high because we make such fundamental mistakes in the opening. We don't understand it nearly enough and I think that would increase a lot if we were given a classical time control there. So I would definitely hope for that."

"I said, ‘I'll change tomorrow if that's okay, I just didn't even realize it today,’ but they said, ‘Well, you have to change now,’ and, well, at that point it became, you know, a bit of a matter of principle for me. [...] And yeah, so here we are."

"They can enforce their rules, that's fine by me [...] my response is that fine, then I'm out, like, fuck you."

"Of course, I could have changed. Obviously, I didn’t want to. I stand by that."

"You could say that both Fischer and Carlsen had or have the ability to let chess look simple. – Viswanathan Anand"

"In six months of working with Magnus I have seen in him many of the qualities of the great champions. – Garry Kasparov"

"The best way to deal with losing is not to lose."

"When did I understand it was a draw? I understood it immediately. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play."

"Honestly, I'm too old at this point to care too much. If this is what [the FIDE wants] to do [...] It's fine by me [...] [I'll] probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here."

"I love the game, and I love to compete, but I am not obsessed with the struggle."

"I am not some sort of freak. I might be very good at chess but I'm just a normal person."

"I get more upset at losing at other things than chess. I always get upset when I lose at Monopoly."

"I feel sorry for players who are always lying awake at night, brooding over their games."

"He played the Berlin, I played the most solid line, yada yada yada, let's go to the doping control."

"African continent GMs do exist; but, according to the system of racial classification, I am the first Black GM in history...it matters, and doesn't matter, all at the same time."

"The threat is stronger than the execution."

"The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it."

"My chess hero."

"The greatest of the champions was, of course, Emanuel Lasker."

"As I pored over the games of the great masters, two styles appealed to me above all others: Lasker and Steinitz. In Lasker I saw, above all, the supreme tactical genius. Whether a game was won or lost mattered little to him; he fought on to get the most out of every position."

"Spinoza's material life and economic independence were based on the grinding of lenses; in Lasker’s life chess played a similar part. But Spinoza was luckier, for his business was such as to leave his mind free and independent; whereas master-chess grips its exponent, shackling the mind and brain, so that the inner freedom and independence of even the strongest character cannot remain unaffected."

"That Lasker was a great fighter is an observation which is common to all studies of his play. Nobody can estimate what enormous will-power went into Lasker's fighting ability; and yet at the core of this quality was his belief that each position is unique, that it has some hidden aspect which the skeptic, the man of resource, will finally unearth."

"Lasker also remarked with his detached, penetratingly ironic insight that Dawid Janowski took so much pleasure in a won position that he could not bear to part with it and wind it up to a victorious conclusion."

"What he really yearned for was some scientific understanding and that beauty peculiar to the process of logical creation, a beauty from whose magic spell no one can escape who has ever felt even its slightest influence."

"It is no easy matter to reply correctly to Lasker's bad moves."

"Emanuel Lasker was undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I came to know in my later life."

"Tarrasch teaches knowledge, Lasker teaches wisdom."

"I rather liked Lasker's stubborn intellectual independence, a most rare quality in a generation whose intellectuals are almost invariably mere camp-followers."