Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, and political activist, and commentator. From 1984 until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world No. 1 for a record 255 months overall for his career. His peak rating of 2851 achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. Kasparov also holds records for the most consecutive professional tournament victories (15) and Chess Oscars (11). This Garry Kasparov quotes will motivate you.
Best Garry Kasparov Quotes
- “If you wish to succeed, you must brave the risk of failure.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Ultimately, what separates a winner from a loser at the grandmaster level is the willingness to do the unthinkable. A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough. Given the opportunity, I must have the guts to explore the game, to upend my opponent’s thinking, and, in so doing, unnerve him. So it is in business: One does not succeed by sticking to convention. When your opponent can easily anticipate every move you make, your strategy deteriorates and becomes commoditized.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don’t have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That’s a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“It is better to have a bad plan than no plan.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “All women are inferior to men.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Losing can persuade you to change what doesn’t need to be changed, and winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to work hard and to study late into the night. You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “If you don’t take risks, you don’t drink champagne.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “The only way to fail for me is just not to try.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“Ultimately, what separates a Winner from a Loser at the Grandmaster level is the Willingness to do the Unthinkable.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “The biggest problem I see among people who want to excel in chess – and in business and in life in general – is not trusting their instincts enough.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “There is a good chance Donald Trump won’t survive four years. Conflict of interest is the biggest danger for Trump. He is destroying one of the pillars of the free world. He is seeking to eliminate the very concept of conflict of interest. A lot of things in America were built on a code of honor. I am confident the damage done by ruling through family and friends will be made impossible by future regulation.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“The highest Art of the Chess player lies in not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “In chess, the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin’s Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “One does not succeed by sticking to convention.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“We think about time as something not to waste, not as something to invest.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “When I was preparing for one term’s work in the Botvinnik school I had to spend a lot of time on king and pawn endings. So when I came to a tricky position in my own games I knew the winning method.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you’re going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“A master looks at every move he would like to make, especially the impossible ones” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “This is the essential element that cannot be measured by any analysis or device, and I believe it’s at the heart of success in all things: the power of intuition and the ability to harness and use it like a master.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Nervous energy is the ammunition we take into any mental battle. If you don’t have enough of it, your concentration will fade. If you have a surplus, the results will explode.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “If you’re already in a fight, you want the first blow to be the last and you had better be the one to throw it.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “The worst enemy of the strategist is the clock. Time trouble… Reduces us all to pure reflex and reaction, tactical play. Emotion and instinct cloud our strategic vision when there is no time for proper evaluation.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Winning is not a secret that belongs to a very few, winning is something that we can learn by studying ourselves, studying the environment, and making ourselves ready for any challenge that is in front of us.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “You can’t overestimate the importance of psychology in chess, and as much as some players try to downplay it, I believe that winning requires a constant and strong psychology not just at the board but in every aspect of your life.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“Chess is mental torture.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “It’s interesting that the greatest minds of computer science, the founding fathers, like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, they all looked at chess as the ultimate test. So they thought, “Oh, if a machine can play chess, and beat strong players, set aside a world champion, that would be the sign of a dawn of the AI era.” With all due respect, they were wrong.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Nowadays, a 13-year-old would probably know more than Bobby Fischer knew when he retired. They analyze all the moves and prepare themselves on their computers. But that doesn’t mean they are special.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “I’ve seen – both in myself and my competitors – how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Any experienced player knows how a change in the character of the play influences your psychological mood.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “If critics and competitors can’t match your results, they will often denigrate the way you achieve them. Fast, intuitive types are called lazy. Dedicated burners of the midnight oil are called obsessed. And while it’s obviously not a bad idea to hear and consider the opinions of others, you should be suspicious when these criticisms emerge right on the heels of success.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Without a goal [maneuvering is] aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you’ll have no sense of strategy.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“It’s quite difficult for me to imagine my life without chess.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “To play chess on a truly high level requires a constant stream of exact, informed decisions, made in real time and under pressure from your opponent. What’s more, it requires a synthesis of some very different virtues, all of which are necessary to good decisions: calculatioñ, creativity and a desire for results. If you ask a Grandmaster, an artist and a computer scientist what makes a good chess player, you’ll get a glimpse of these different strengths in action.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Solving new problems is what keeps us moving forward as individuals and as a society, so don’t back down.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Putin can’t afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “This obligation to move can be a burden to a player without strategic vision.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “I would say, you have a unique chance of learning more about the game of chess with your computer than Bobby Fischer, or even myself, could manage throughout our entire lives. What is very important is that you will use this power productively and you will not be hijacked by the computer screen. Always keep your personality intact.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “When your house is on fire, you cant be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we say in Chess, if your King is under attack you don’t worry about losing a Pawn on the Queen’s side” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “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.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “With each success the ability to change is reduced. My longtime friend and coach Grandmaster Yuri Dokhoian, aptly compared it to being dipped in bronze. Each victory added another coat.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“Donald Trump envies anyone who can do things he can’t.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “I wouldn’t place much stock in numbers. I don’t believe that they reflect Putin’s true popularity. Just think about how the pollsters proceed. They call people and they ask them questions on the street. In today’s Russia, it takes a lot of courage to tell a stranger something critical about the head of the Kremlin. And yet more than 20 percent do so nonetheless.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “In an age when schools are facing significant budgetary restraints, there is a greater need than ever to make chess available to as many students as possible. We’ve assembled the very best in chess education to develop a complete chess curriculum – K through 12. We’ve designed a program that encourages creativity, instills self-discipline and offers hope and a feeling of accomplishment to millions of children.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “I like to say that the attacker always has the advantage.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Tarrasch’s ‘dogmas’ are not eternal truisms, but merely instructional material presented in an accessible and witty form, those necessary rudiments from which one can begin to grasp the secrets of chess.” ~ Garry Kasparov
