Quotes from 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Media outlets do not exist in a vacuum.

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