Boris Yeltsin

A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.

A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.

The main problem with being president is the constant sense that you are inside a glass bowl for everyone to see, or in a kind of barometric chamber with an artificial atmosphere where you must stay all the time.

The main problem with being president is the constant sense that you are inside a glass bowl for everyone to see, or in a kind of barometric chamber with an artificial atmosphere where you must stay all the time.

I want to apologize for our unfulfilled dreams. What we thought would be easy has proved painfully difficult. I would like to apologize for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and civilized future at just one go. I myself believed in this. We haven't managed to make this leap, and I was naive in thinking we could.

I want to apologize for our unfulfilled dreams. What we thought would be easy has proved painfully difficult. I would like to apologize for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and civilized future at just one go. I myself believed in this. We haven't managed to make this leap, and I was naive in thinking we could.

I am not going to be a puppet of anyone. I will be an independent leader.

Russia needs a strong hand, but not a dictatorship.

I will lie down on the railroad tracks if prices go up again.

The Soviet Union has ceased to exist.

I have always been a difficult person.

I am tired of being a communist. I want to be a human being.

You can't build a new house without tearing down the old one.

The main thing is to preserve democracy, even if it is a bit messy.

The Russian people have shown that they are capable of building a new, democratic state.

I drink, I swear, I play the accordion. I am a normal Russian man.

We have to be patient. We have to be persistent. We have to be brave.

I am not a saint. I am a human being.

The reforms are irreversible.

I will never betray Russia.