"Put two players against each other who both have perfect technique, who both avoid weaknesses, and what is left?—a sorry caricature of chess.{{cite book"

"Without error there can be no brilliancy."

"Dr. Tarrasch is a thinker, fond of deep and complex speculation. He will accept the efficacy and usefulness of a move if at the same time he considers it beautiful and theoretically right. But I accept that sort of beauty only if and when it happens to be useful. He admires an idea for its depth, I admire it for its efficacy. My opponent believes in beauty, I believe in strength. I think that by being strong, a move is beautiful too."

"He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess — artificial theories, supported by few instances and upheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy."

"You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation."

"Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judgement. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight."

"On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite."

"What is immobile must suffer violence. The light-winged bird will easily escape the huge dragon, but the firmly rooted big tree must remain where it is and may have to give up its leaves, fruit, perhaps even its life."

"It is curious that it is far easier to maintain a high "manners" rating if, like Kasparov, you simply don't speak to anyone. I still have much to learn from the great man..."

"They could start by removing some personnel: the head-butting, move-retracting, tournament-rigging, Zurab Azmaiparashvili for instance. He is a disgrace to the organisation. But never let it be said that he is a dunderhead."

"Rublevsky is not a sexy player."

"A friend of mine recently joked that his mobile phone will beat Magnus Carlsen. I said, ‘What are you talking about? My microwave could beat Magnus Carlsen.'"

"Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation."

"I honestly feel very humble when I study Capablanca's games."

"Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card."

"Botvinnik grew up in an assimilated family, but encountered antisemitism in daily life. He displayed courage in the dark years of Stalin and after, and published warm words about Israel, Pinhas Rutenberg, and the kibbutz, defending the right of the Jews to live in their ancient homeland. In contrast to other Jewish cultural activists, he never signed letters condemning Israel."

"If you want to become a World Champion you should avoid playing in Open tournaments."

"People knew about 110 years of chess history. Nowadays, nobody is able to tell you the name of the world champion of 2000."

"Even a dickhead would do a better job than Ilyumzhinov. The chaos in the chess world is caused by “leaders” who are unable to do their job properly."

"Seville never had a rich chess tradition. Valencia is entirely different, it is enough to say that one of the city squares is named after me."

"My relations with Korchnoi depend on whether he has slept well. If he had bad dreams, he speaks a lot of rubbish."

"I have a weakness for any piece in excess of my opponent's numbers - from pawn to queen."

"Fortune favors the bold, especially when they are Alekhine."

"Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card."

"I can comprehend Alekhine's combinations well enough; but where he gets his attacking chances from and how he infuses such life into the very opening - that is beyond me."

"Alekhine's attacks came suddenly, like destructive thunderstorms that erupted from a clear sky."

"In playing through an Alekhine game one suddenly meets a move which simply takes one's breath away."

"Capablanca was the greatest talent, but Alekhine was the greatest in his achievements."

"It was impossible to win against Capablanca; against Alekhine it was impossible to play."

"During a chess competition a chess master should be a combination of a beast of prey and a monk."

"Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents."

"Chess first of all teaches you to be objective."

"I study chess eight hours a day, on principle."

"The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered as an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the moment he committed the crime."

"It is to Petrosian's advantage that his opponents never know when he is suddenly going to play like Mikhail Tal"

"In those years, it was easier to win the Soviet Championship than a game against 'Iron Tigran'"

"They say my chess games should be more interesting. I could be more interesting - and also lose."

"Some consider that when I play I am excessively cautious, but it seems to me that the question may be a different one. I try to avoid chance. Those who rely on chance should play cards or roulette. Chess is something quite different."

"Chess is a game by its form, an art by its content and a science by the difficulty of gaining mastery in it. Chess can convey as much happiness as a good book or work of music can."

"You cannot look at the images from Ukraine in recent weeks and say there is no pure evil. Mariupol destroyed, Bucha slaughtered, Kramatorsk train station massacred. And worse is yet to come. And these horrors are not from Poland in 1945. Not from Rwanda in 1994. Not Aleppo 2016. This is Europe this week. How could this happen? How did we forget what evil can do? We have lost the generation that saw World War II firsthand. Otherwise we reserve absolute evil for fiction. In fables, they believe in true evil. Good is harder to define. There is no pure good. If anyone says they know what pure good is, it's probably evil. In fantasy tales of hobbits and elves and dwarves, there was an idea that good comes in different forms and shapes, often in conflict. But they had to be united when facing absolute evil. Good will disagree. Evil says, "No more disagreements ever." That was life in real Mordor, the Soviet Union. That's what Putin wants for Russia and the world. We celebrated the end of the Cold War, but for too long, we forgot that evil doesn’t die. It can be buried for a while under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, but it grows back through the cracks of our apathy."

"It's not common, in our age, for someone to retire while still at the top, but I'm a man who needs a goal, and who wants to make a difference."

"Great leaders are formed only by taking on great challenges."

"The NSA is to the Stasi what a bad hotel is to a maximum security prison."

"You can get quite far in a democracy if you can convince a majority that they are victims of a minority, and that only you can protect them."

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

"[C]hess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Soviet communist regime over the decadent West."

""Socialism with a human face"? ... Frankenstein also had a human face."