Emanuel Lasker

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

"He hated chess as much as he loved it, using it chielfy as a means of livelihood while he devoted himself to problems of philosophy and mathematics."

"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."

"My chess hero."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Without error there can be no brilliancy."

"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"

"Although the adage "If you find a good move, look for a better one" is often attributed to Lasker, it actually dates earlier."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Tarrasch teaches knowledge, Lasker teaches wisdom."

"Steinitz always looked for the objectively right move. Tarrasch always claimed to have found the objectively right move. Lasker did nothing of the kind. He never bothered about what might or might not be the objectively right move; all he cared for was to find whatever move was likely to be most embarrassing for the specific person sitting on the other side of the board."

"Im Leben werden die Partien nie so unstrittig gewonnen wie im Spiel; das Spiel gibt uns Genugtuungen, die uns das Leben versagt."

"Go hat eine durchgehendere Logik als das Schach, ist ihm an Einfachheit überlegen und steht ihm, glaube ich, an Schwung der Phantasie nicht nach."

"Auf dem Schachbrett der Meister gilt Lüge und Heuchelei nicht lange. Sie werden vom Wetterstrahl der schöpferischen Kombination getroffen, irgendwann einmal, und können die Tatsache nicht wegdeuteln, wenigstens nicht für lange, und die Sonne der Gerechtigkeit leuchtet hell in den Kämpfen der Schachmeister."