Best 291 quotes of Garry Kasparov on MyQuotes

A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough.

A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport.

A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who has led anti-corruption protests, had a blog about a credit line to a company owned by Vladimir Putin's son-in-law, $1.75 billion from Russian state funds; this is one transaction. Putin controls more money directly and indirectly than any individual in human history.

All experiments that are related to the games when you have humans versus machines in the games - whether it's chess or "Go" or any other game - machines will prevail not because they can solve the game. Chess is mathematically unsolvable. But at the end of the day, the machine doesn't have to solve the game. The machine has to win the game. And to win the game, it just has to make fewer mistakes than humans. Which is not that difficult since humans are humans and vulnerable, and we don't have the same steady hand as the computer.

All that now seems to stand between Nigel and the prospect of the world crown is the unfortunate fact that fate brought him into this world only two years after Kasparov.

A machine helps us to annihilate our weaknesses. We don't have a steady hand. We can lose all vigilance. We can be distracted by something that is not that relevant. But we have intuition. We can feel certain things. And with a machine you can check whether it's right or wrong. That's why by bringing the two together, you create a very, very powerful combination.

A master looks at every move he would like to make, especially the impossible ones

Any experienced player knows how a change in the character of the play influences your psychological mood.

At a certain point, the atmosphere in the West could change. But I don't see determined political will [for that] at the moment.

At any time the atmosphere in the West could change, for which determined political will I do not see at the moment is a necessary prerequisite. From the sidelines, it seems that he's caught up in his own exorbitant ambitions.

Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.

A very strong player can manage and can just know how to manage a thousand positions. I get it; it's a very arbitrary number. So then you have the world champion who could do more. But, again, any increase in numbers creates, sort of, a new level of playing. And then you go to the very top, and the difference is so minimal, but it does exist. So even a few players who never became world champion, like Vassily Ivanchuk, for instance, I think they belong to the same category.

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe, being under the control of the USSR, would call their states "people's republics." The sham that is currently going on in the states of the former Soviet Union is due to the fact that the politicians in power are eager to polish up their image abroad.

Barack Obama took over after Vladimir Putin's first aggression, in Georgia. In 2009, he did the reset policy because they had these stupid ideas about former president Dmitry Medvedev. They thought he would be the leader, not Putin. Everyone played this game with Medvedev as their bet, Berlin, Paris, London, the idea of smoothly transferring to something more acceptable. It was always a charade, a Putin project to solidify his power and come back after four years of nominal occupation of the office by Medvedev.

Besides problems of traditional societies, the Caucasus has to cope with quite a few unsettled territorial conflicts that also nurture authoritarian governmental structures.

Boris Nemtsov and I began to argue after Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. In my opinion, there was no longer a realistic chance to achieve regime change through peaceful political means, or real elections. Boris, on the other hand, never lost this hope. He felt that my assessment was premature and said: "You have to live a long time to see changes in Russia." He was deprived of that opportunity.

Boris Vasilievich was the only top-class player of his generation who played gambits regularly and without fear ... Over a period of 30 years he did not lose a single game with the King's Gambit, and among those defeated were numerous strong players of all generations, from Averbakh, Bronstein and Fischer, to Seirawan.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

But we must not forget the effort undertaken by the ruling elite in Russia to manipulate Western politicians, businessmen as well as journalists. That's why [Vladimir] Putin's "fifth column" is that powerful in the West.

By strictly observing Botvinnik's rule regarding the thorough analysis of one's own games, with the years I have come to realize that this provides the foundation for the continuous development of chess mastery.

By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.

By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment.

Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.

Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook.

Chess is mental torture.

Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance

Chess - it's a nonmainstream game. And the irony is that when you look at Hollywood, it kept using chess as the symbol of intelligence for its heroes, for its top characters, all the time. So it's from "Casablanca" to "Harry Potter." You always have chess as a very important element to demonstrate intelligence, while in normal life people think it's just a weird intelligence - like AI.

Chess strength in general and chess strength in a specific match are by no means one and the same thing.

...comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Constructs like race will decline in relevance in a roboticized world. That how well one human subset or community - a race, a nationality, a religion - is doing will be secondary to how well humanity in general is doing in face of the robot revolution.

Dictators are not strategists in the way I normally use that term. All the dictator cares about is survival. That means constantly worrying about the tactical response, "What do I do today, tonight, tomorrow morning, to stay alive?" Vladimir Putin doesn't care what happens a year or five years from now. He just cares about staying in the game. That is all he needs to survive.

Dictatorships can exist with free markets - not that China is really a free market - especially in poor countries where the regime insists that it's a choice between food and liberty, a false choice. But increasing affluence will inevitably result in political pressure.

Dictatorships sometimes fall unexpectedly and quickly. And [Vladimir] Putin knows that for him, the loss of power doesn't mean a comfortable retirement, but something completely different.

Energy is connected to physical fitness. One of the reasons I stayed at the top so long is that I was tremendously fit. At 36, I was fitter than most opponents ten years younger.

Enormous self-belief, intuition, the ability to take a risk at a critical moment and go in for a very dangerous play with counter-chances for the opponent - it is precisely these qualities that distinguish great players.

Even well-known historians like Edward Gibbon are talking about how the soldiers of the 18th century were not able to do the same type of exercise [like Romans].

Everyone, at any age, has talents that aren't fully developed-even those who reach the top of their profession.

Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.

Few things are as psychologically brutal as chess.

For inspiration I look to those great players who consistently found original ways to shock their opponents. None did this better than the eighth world champion, Mikhail Tal. The "Magician of Riga" rose to become champion in 1960 at age twenty-three and became famous for his aggressive, volatile play.