“I play honestly and I play to win. If I lose, I take my medicine.”

When I won the World Championship in ’72, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.

I studied that first Karpov-Kasparov match for a year and a half before I cracked it, what they were doing, and discovered that it was all prearranged move-by-move. There’s no doubt of it in my mind.

Genius. It’s a word. What does it really mean? If I win I’m a genius. If I don’t, I’m not.

A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he’s like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

I want to see the U.S. wiped out. Death to the U.S.

Psychologically, you have to have confidence in yourself and this confidence should be based on fact.

You are never too old to play chess!

The Russians have held my title for ten years and they’re going to be in for it when I win the Championship. They’re going to have to wait and play under my conditions.

I don’t keep any close friends. I don’t keep any secrets. I don’t need friends. I just tell everybody everything, that’s all.

I’d like to travel around, be an international playboy. They have all that money; they could really do it right. Look at (Errol) Flynn.

I don’t remember one thing I learned in school.

I don’t believe in wasting time. My goal is to win the World Chess Championship; to beat the Russians. I take this very seriously.

I usually never stay at the board after a game. Especially against Spassky. I made a dumb suggestion and he refuted it instantly! I know I’m going to have to play him some day and it was really stupid to look like such a jerk in front of him.

Too many times, people don’t try their best. They don’t have the keen spirit; the winning spirit. And once you make it you’ve got to guard your reputation – every day go in like an unknown to prove yourself. That’s why I don’t clown around.

The main idea behind any opening is to get a strong pawn center and give your pieces a lot of scope so that you cramp your opponent’s position and can attack weaknesses in his game.

Computers are our only opponents that don’t always have no excuse when losing against me.

Always laugh when you can; it is cheap medicine. Merriment is a philosophy not well understood. It is the sunny side of existence.

I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

When you flop, that’s just another message that you don’t know how to play me. Stand up and take your medicine like a man.

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.

I tell you, it’s funny because the only time I think about HIV is when I have to take my medicine twice a day.

The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it

There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.

Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts.