It is the Germans who are responsible for the fact that I became a fabricator of arms. If not for them, I would have constructed agricultural machines. (...) If someone asks me how I can sleep at night knowing that my arms have killed millions of people, I respond that I have no problem sleeping, my conscience is clean. I constructed arms to defend my country.
Interpretation
Kalashnikov reflects on his role in creating weapons and justifies it as a defense of his country.
In this quote, Mikhail Kalashnikov expresses a contentious perspective on his contribution to the arms industry, highlighting how external circumstances led him to become a weapon maker instead of pursuing a peaceful vocation in agriculture. He emphasizes a clear conscience in his actions, believing that the purpose of his creations was to protect his homeland, not to cause destruction, despite the tragic consequences of his inventions.
In practice
This quote can be referenced in discussions about the ethics of weapon production.
When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed.' So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable.
My spiritual pain is unbearable. I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?
The fact that people die because of an AK-47 is not because of the designer, but because of politics.
People often ask me how I feel about my invention being used to kill people every day and the AK being a common weapon of ethnic conflicts. I want to make it clear that I created my assault rifle to protect my country. You can blame politicians for its spreading out of control on a global scale.
If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman... because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.
To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.
Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is [as] admirable and sound as it is dangerous – from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
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