Nobel Peace Laureate 19990, Mikhail Gorbachev (born in 1931), President of USSR. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy for nuclear disarmament and the strengthening of global security.
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Soon afterwards he announced “perestroika”, a policy reform which aimed at democratisation of the state and moving towards a market-oriented economy. The reforms were never fully implemented but they were conducive to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of USSR’s satellite communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. In March 1990, Mr Gorbachev was elected the first and the last President of the Soviet Union. He resigned from the office in December 1991, following the collapse of the USSR.
5 famous and inspiring quotes of Mikhail Gorbachev
- “If not me, who? And if not now, when?”
- “If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.”
- “For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change. Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.”
- “We desperately need to recognize that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.”
- ”What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.”
“Preparing for my address I found in an old Russian encyclopedia a definition of “peace” as a “commune” — the traditional cell of Russian peasant life. I saw in that definition the people’s profound understanding of peace as harmony, concord, mutual help, and cooperation.
This understanding is embodied in the canons of world religions and in the works of philosophers from antiquity to our time. Today, peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to cooperation and common creativity among countries and nations. Peace is movement towards globality and universality of civilization. Never before has the idea that peace is indivisible been so true as it is now. Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences. And, ideally, peace means the absence of violence. It is an ethical value.” – Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Peace Lecture
