Top 142 Quotes & Sayings by Masha Gessen

I don't have a lot of hope for Russia when Putin goes, because I think that the kind of damage that has been done to that country hasn't been understood. We've never seen a country that has been this battered.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their hopes shifted to the first post-Soviet generation, and then the second one.

Putin has this ritual of having the televised meetings with ministers. Cameras will be allowed in to film the first five minutes of a meeting that is conducted entirely for the cameras. We don't even know whether the meeting then goes on.

Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

I really can't abide conspiracy theories, because I believe that everything in the world stems from idiocy and incompetence. That's certainly true of most of what's happened in Russia under Putin.

I would much rather engage people in a conversation about deregulation and reversals of women's rights and civil rights and LGBT rights than conversations about Russian interference.

I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.

Incomprehensible messaging is a very important part of Russian propaganda.

Now, academics are not always the easiest people to talk to, and the scholarly papers aren't always the easiest papers to read, but frankly, psychology papers, especially papers and books on terrorism, are very easy to read, and journalists should be reading them.

Putin was very careful to gradually sort of rotate people in and out of power, to make sure that he had competent bureaucrats by his side at all times, to keep the machine running.

In war you're either a collaborator or you're a resistor. I mean you don't get to be neutral.

What Trump is not smart enough to even grasp is that the kind of popularity that Putin has can only be achieved in the context of retro-totalitarianism.

I think there was certainly contact between the Trump campaign and Russians, which is perfectly normal. All campaigns in the modern age have contact with representatives of foreign governments.

I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.

I think that Putin's strategy has been throwing a lot of money, fairly haphazardly, at a lot of projects aimed at disrupting Western relations and undermining trust in democracies. They may have gotten farther in the States than anywhere else.

Donald Trump ran for autocrat, he didn't run for president. The first thing in autocrat does is take over the media, or alienate the media, which is what Trump is doing, he is doing it actively.

Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.

To exercise ignorance, racist prejudice, a love of power and total disregard for factual accuracy, one has to inhabit a world where everything can mean anything and nothing is certain.

There is no law that guarantees press access to the White House. Communication was lessening during the Obama years. There was every reason to suspect that Trump was going to create an adversarial relationship and that people were going to be faced with the impossible dilemma between sort-of-complicity and access.

Violent behavior predicts violent behavior. Obviously not every domestic abuser will become a terrorist. If somebody is prone to violence, and also has radical beliefs, and also feels very slighted, that's when you have the combination.

By the mid-noughties, I found that I was no longer the only openly gay person in every setting. At one point, a couple of Moscow magazine publishers even got the idea that they should actively headhunt gay and lesbian staff.

There can be a conspiracy, but the presence of a conspiracy is actually not an excuse for conspiracy thinking.

I looked at Putin and was terrified from the very beginning. That makes me look very prescient because he actually turned out to be exactly the monster that I thought he was.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Dictators fall when they're overconfident; they stay in power when they're paranoid.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.

Putin really assumed that once Trump - who had such clear admiration for him - was elected, it would be convenient for Trump to change the relationship with Russia profoundly and instantly.

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.

Hate has a great unifying potential.

Putin has built a mobilisation society, his sky high popularity numbers, which Donald Trump so envies, are fully dependent on being able to mobilise the population against an enemy and that imagined enemy is the United States.

Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized... World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.

You know, I don't walk home alone at night. If I drive into our courtyard after dark, I ask my partner to come outside with the dog to meet me. Those are, you know, basic sort of urban precautions.

Fact checking Donald Trump is a really... It is kind of fun but it is ungratifying because nothing checks out.

Trump, like Putin, has a demonstrably thin skin and short temper when it comes to being criticized by journalists.

I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.

There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.

When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that's necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.

Trump very much wants to be liked by Putin and I think sincerely admires him. Putin doesn't know how to deal with somebody who positions himself like that.

Most Russians believe they've never met an LGBT person in their lives. Also they immediately see LGBT people as 'other,' lending to the success of singling the group out as a 'problem.'

Russians didn't elect Trump. Even if there was collusion, even if every hypothesis that has - that is at play in the Russia investigation is proved, still, Americans elected Trump, and he is president.

A political conversation is a conversation in which people with different views come to agreements about how they're going to inhabit this society together.

Of course, Putin may well have reasons for wanting Trump to be president - not least Trump's apparent skepticism toward NATO and his lack of opposition to Russia's military interventions in Ukraine and Syria.

Of course, Oliver Stone is not Donald Trump. But he shares with him a certain way of seeing the world and being in the world - and the luxury of persisting in this way of being, and even making a spectacle of it.

Where incompetence is prized, it is ever-present.

Any country is either becoming more democratic or less democratic. I think the United States hasn't tended to its journey toward democracy in a long time.

If human rights are an attribute of being human, then we must consider the fact that tens of millions of displaced people around the world have been rendered less than human.

Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it's not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

Journalists casually use terms like crossing the border illegally when referring to asylum seekers - when in fact there is no law that says they must use the ports of entry.

I kept thinking, I'm not going to do political journalism, because there's no way to keep my principles and be a political journalist, so I'll edit a popular science magazine. This will be my salvation, and I'll emerge with my integrity intact. That didn't even happen.

First of all, radical beliefs are not a predictor of terrorist behavior: most people who hold radical beliefs never become terrorists, and some terrorists don't hold radical beliefs.

Putin is an uneducated, unintelligent, uncultured man who has no plan.

I have experienced power as a journalist. On three different occasions, when I wrote about individual immigrants or refugees, the article - or, in one case, my presence in the courtroom - appeared to positively change the outcome of their cases.

Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority - not the capture of moral high ground.

You know, I think that a conversation about what Facebook is - is it a public resource, even though it's a privately owned corporation? Is it a media company? It is certainly not just a platform, as Facebook has claimed repeatedly. I think that is a really important question.

I think Putin's popularity was genuine when he first came to power. He was seen as a welcome relief from the Yeltsin era.

I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.

For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.