Margarita Simonyan Quotes

When you read Western press, you probably get a feeling that all Russian press is censored, there's no freedom at all, we can't say whatever, which is absolutely, absolutely, completely untrue.

- Margarita Simonyan

Immigrants are not the real problem. The real problem is much more serious: intolerance and hatred of indigenous ethnic groups. You can prohibit immigration, but what can you do about non-Russian ethnic groups living in their native territories in Russia?

- Margarita Simonyan

All of the people who work in the Russian government and Russian presidential administration, in this way or another, work for Vladimir Putin.

- Margarita Simonyan

We never make editorial decisions with people who are working closely with Vladimir Putin, unless you consider myself a person who is working closely with Vladimir Putin.

- Margarita Simonyan

If I saw and if I really sincerely thought that what Putin is doing is harmful for my country and for my people and it needs to be stopped, I wouldn't hesitate to do that.

- Margarita Simonyan

It is high time Western establishments stopped blaming Russia for all their problems.

- Margarita Simonyan

One might have thought that Brexit would be a wake-up call for the American media. Yet, just as in the U.K. referendum, 'Russia' became the buzzword in the U.S. election that the political and media establishments thought would scare people into voting for the status quo.

- Margarita Simonyan

Apparently, all foreign media organisations have to follow an approved script of acceptable coverage, lest they are accused of interference. And make no mistake: we're not talking about neutrality. The only acceptable approach was, 'Support Clinton, attack Trump'.

- Margarita Simonyan

The root cause of xenophobia in Russia is not religious differences between Muslims and Christians. Nor is it crime. The root cause is the terrible education that children acquire on the street, at school, and at home.

- Margarita Simonyan

RT was one of the first channels to cover the Wikileaks story and to interview Julian Assange a long time ago, way before it made headlines around the globe.

- Margarita Simonyan

Somehow it did not occur to us that, in a developed democracy, regular media advertising could turn out to be a suspicious and harmful activity.

- Margarita Simonyan

There's a huge generational gap between the Soviet-school journalists and the new journalists. We were not brought up working on propaganda; we were brought up in the new Russia, working on the news.

- Margarita Simonyan

Our job is to tell the world about Russia and to report world news from a Russian viewpoint.

- Margarita Simonyan

When the world normalizes, everything is going to be fine with RT. When the U.S. and Russia get along again - and I don't see any deep reasons why we shouldn't get along... we are going to work normally like a normal news organization.

- Margarita Simonyan

The American Justice Department has left us with no choice. Our lawyers say that if we don't register as a foreign agent, the director of our company in America could be arrested, and the accounts of the company could be seized.

- Margarita Simonyan

Russian children typically hear racist and ethnic slurs against Caucasus natives at home before hearing it on the streets.

- Margarita Simonyan

I'm so tired of this argument that all we ever do is under Kremlin orders and so and so forth. Tell me, how is it possible? I am not on the air. If you watch RT, you will see that all of our shows are hosted by people to whom it would be impossible to tell them anything.

- Margarita Simonyan

If you look at any station, you will see that what people are reporting comes from what they believe in, where they stand, their background, what their countries believe in.

- Margarita Simonyan

What's obvious is that the U.S. has a very imperfect system, and yet its leaders are obsessed with lecturing the rest of the world on how to organise their affairs.

- Margarita Simonyan

Not too many people out there are interested in Russia so much that they really want to watch things about Russia and only about Russia.

- Margarita Simonyan

It worries me that western journalists, especially British ones, call everyone they don't like 'marginal.'

- Margarita Simonyan

America had Russia wrapped around it little pinky through the whole '90s. We did everything you told us. And we were eager to do more and more. The whole nation - Russian nation was like, 'Tell us what else we can do to please you. We want to be like you. We love you.' And then in 1999, bam. You bomb Yugoslavia. And that was the end of it.

- Margarita Simonyan

If we do have people appearing on the air live that are later found out to be Holocaust deniers or anything like that, we immediately put them onto a list of people who are forbidden from the air.

- Margarita Simonyan

British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump: 'Oh my God!'

- Margarita Simonyan

There is state-run television in Russia, which is more loyal to the state, as it always is with state television in any country. We have private owned networks; some of them are oppositional. We have thousands of regional networks that, in their regions, are more watched than the so-called federal stations.

- Margarita Simonyan

Twitter has revealed some monstrous information in Congress: we spent money on our ad campaigns. Just as all the usual media organizations in the world do.

- Margarita Simonyan

I noticed that mainstream western TV channels, especially CNN and ABC, show the same thing.

- Margarita Simonyan

In the U.S., the country that has always been lecturing the world about the value of freedoms - of freedom of speech, of everyone's right to speak up - the U.S. has now become a beacon, a leader, in this movement to shut everyone up. That's so disappointing.

- Margarita Simonyan

We congratulate American freedom of speech and all who still believe in it.

- Margarita Simonyan

Russia has never been very good at explaining itself to foreigners.

- Margarita Simonyan

To all the self-righteous defenders of 'freedom of speech' who oh-so-ardently proclaimed that FARA registration places no restrictions whatsoever on RT's journalistic work in the U.S.: Withdrawal of Congressional credentials speaks much louder than empty platitudes.

- Margarita Simonyan

Being government funded does not necessarily mean being biased, just like being privately funded does not necessarily mean being independent.

- Margarita Simonyan

We do have our mistakes sometimes, like 'The New York Times' does, like everything does. We correct them.

- Margarita Simonyan

We want to develop into a really trusted name that people turn to because they want to know what's going on in the country.

- Margarita Simonyan

When the USSR collapsed, I was 11, and unlike many people, I don't miss it.

- Margarita Simonyan

It's time to wake up to the reality that ignoring the genuine concerns of the 'fringe,' until it becomes the majority, is patently ridiculous. That the scapegoating of alternative opinions doesn't work.

- Margarita Simonyan

All of our anchors begin their shows with 'Hello from Moscow.'

- Margarita Simonyan

Mainstream media journalists, especially in the United States and West Europe, prefer to ignore those problems in their own countries which they usually criticize in other countries, including in Russia.

- Margarita Simonyan

All of the mainstream French media - all of them - were jumping out of their pants to make people vote for Macron - all of them.

- Margarita Simonyan

I have two children, and I'm very, very peaceful.

- Margarita Simonyan

There is not a single international foreign TV channel that is doing something other than promotion of the values of the country that it is broadcasting from.

- Margarita Simonyan

Believe me, most of the people in Russia are seeing the West as a threat.

- Margarita Simonyan

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the television businesses found it was easier to hire 16- or 18-year-olds and teach them everything from the beginning rather than re-teach the old-school folk.

- Margarita Simonyan

Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.

- Margarita Simonyan

When we were a quiet, little-noticed channel telling stories from Russia, our audience was negligible. When we started being really provocative... our audience started to grow.

- Margarita Simonyan

The disgusting truth is that some of the less-educated families in the Caucasus hate and despise Russians simply because they are Russian, just as some less-educated Russian families feel the same way about people from the Caucasus.

- Margarita Simonyan

Media outlets do not exist in a vacuum.

- Margarita Simonyan

You might not believe me, but I really don't like conspiracy theories.

- Margarita Simonyan

We removed 'Russia Today' from the logo after many colleagues, also from foreign media, told us that it was diminishing our potential audience.

- Margarita Simonyan

American TV news is much more sophisticated. I think that American TV networks, it looks like, they invest a lot into news.

- Margarita Simonyan

I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist ever since I was 18.

- Margarita Simonyan

I don't understand why any country is given a chance to make its point of view seen and heard by the world, and Russia is not given that chance.

- Margarita Simonyan

There is just a small difference between the United States and Russia - Russia does not teach the whole world democracy.

- Margarita Simonyan

When Russia is at war, we are, of course, on Russia's side.

- Margarita Simonyan

We would like to be the third-most-watched news channel in the U.K.

- Margarita Simonyan

I don't like wars. Any wars.

- Margarita Simonyan

It's impossible to start making a weapon only when the war already started!

- Margarita Simonyan

The information weapon, of course, is used in critical moments, and war is always a critical moment.

- Margarita Simonyan