Top 142 Quotes & Sayings by Masha Gessen - Page 2

My family immigrated to the States in 1981, when I was 14.

Russia, at the start of the 21st century, at least in its larger cities, very much resembled the United States of the early 1990s: being gay was no longer criminal or shameful, but it was still not a topic for polite conversation or public discussion.

Poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies.

To effectively create the image of an enemy you have to show first of all that the enemy is extremely dangerous, but on the other hand less than human.

There's nothing effective against Trump. Trump is Trump. Trump is going to lie. Trump is going to act the way he's acting. No amount of reason, no amount of criticism, no amount of anything is going to work to change Trump's behavior. Putin is exactly the same way.

Basically, Trump's significant first moves have been twofold. To marginalize the media, and to start dismantling the federal government.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of reform, and there was a lot of forward movement on a lot of fronts in Russia. There was fundamental economic reform. There was a new constitution and an electoral system built from scratch. But the judicial system was probably the most difficult to reform.

Many Americans have been looking for an explanation for Mr. Trump's apparent adoration of Mr. Putin. How can a powerful, wealthy American man hold affection for the tyrannical, corrupt leader of a hostile power?

If you grew up in Boston, you actually grew up thinking that Patriots' Day is a major American holiday, sort of like the other Fourth of July.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.

I realized - I've been an opposition journalist in Russia for a long time. And I've often considered how real risks are and how much of a risk I can take.

I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Trump and are indestructible.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.

Most Russians actually were living much better by the end of the 1990s than by the beginning of the 1990s. Most Russians were no longer confronting food shortages.

Scholars of totalitarianism talk about the importance of this constant movement, this forever war, this need to do battle on behalf of something that needs protection. In Russia, this something has been postulated as faith and traditional values.

I mean, hunger strike is almost a ritual in a Russian prison colony. It actually has been going back to Soviet times. It's a way of protesting.

Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.

There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.

I wanted to show something that Americans don't usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.

I worked both as a Russian journalist and an American journalist and ran a bunch of magazines in Moscow over the course of about 20 years.

I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.

I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. They're troublemaking efforts. They're also not illegal.

It seems that probably Putin's father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.

Abstracted hatred is incredibly potent. There's never the risk of having it challenged by the reality of living human beings.

I would not attribute any strategic thinking to Trump.

In 'Chernobyl,' which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film - or, for that matter, in Russian television or film.

Americans voted for Trump. A lot of people in this country feel the system of representative democracy hasn't worked for them for a long, long time. And those are the issues that this election gives us an unfortunate opportunity to engage with. And engaging instead with the Russia conspiracy takes up that bandwidth.

The most difficult and, in some ways, the most rewarding thing I've ever been through was emigrating as a teenager.

I do a very good impersonation of an American - I went to high school here - but I've spent most of my life in Russia.

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.

I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called 'vegetarian,' experience of migration. It involved planes and trains - the actual compartments of passenger trains - and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.

It is so impossible to predict how much influence what you write will have, and what sorts of anxieties and imaginaries it will tap into.

When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.

My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink.

The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.

It's very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.

There are a couple of ways to use the word democracy, and the way that I think is productive is to think about democracy as not a state that can actually be achieved, but as an ideal.

There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend not to know that if you don't know that he lied yesterday, and the day before. So, to my mind when NPR says they don't know if he's intentionally lying, they're lying. We have to be smarter about it.

With Pussy Riot - this was a prank! It was a brilliant, artistically gifted prank. But they didn't expect to go to prison! They were college girls who became political prisoners for two years. That makes them very similar to the people who were "just going to a protest one day" and got arrested. They had no idea they were risking the rest of their lives. Because you're never the same after you've spent two years in a gulag.

For the first stage of his dictatorship, Vladimir Putin was involved in destroying public space. On the first day he was in office, he introduced legislation that reformed and over five years effectively dismantled the electoral system. So anything that passes for elections in Russia today has nothing to do with actual elections.

What's going on in Russia is not that the public is homophobic, but that the Kremlin has unleashed a war. You don't fight a war by distributing well-meaning books about how the other side really isn't so bad.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

... fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there-because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don't think it should exist.

I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Donald Trump and are indestructible. I actually think democracy is not a definable and achievable state. 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. It's been becoming less democratic, and right now it's in danger of becoming drastically less democratic.

A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.

Were there open gays and lesbians before the West started influencing Russia? No, there weren't. In fact, the most out person in the country, until recently, was me. I turned gay in America. I was a nice Soviet fourteen-year-old when I left, and I came back a lesbian.

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

There's another piece of legislation in Russia that would make "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" a cause for removing parental rights, and remove children from same-sex families altogether. It was withdrawn, most likely temporarily, under international pressure. What "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" means, nobody knows. And this is part of the point of all of these laws. They have to be vague to not just enable but require selective enforcement.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

Donald Trump clearly doesn't have the intellectual capacity to have a concept of what he's doing. I think he has a very strong instinct for using lying to assert power, and that's what he does. Every time he lies, he's saying "I can say whatever I want, whenever I want to, and there's nothing you can do about it." I think he understands that instinctively. He has a finely honed sense for power and manipulation. Bullying is another way to put it. He's a highly skilled bully, but bullying is not a very sophisticated strategy.

When I was touring with my Vladimir Putin biography, which was published all over the world, people would ask me, How come you're still there, why haven't you left? I would say, I'm staying, it's my home. He can leave! It felt very good to say that. But now - he wins. It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe. And yet he's gotten people out of the country. That's the most terrifying thing about the current situation, and for the future of the country.

Here in the U.S. we do have a problem with a president Donald Trump who uses language in two distinctly destructive ways. One is to lie, and to use words to mean their opposite. Like, when he calls the Russian investigation a "witch hunt." He can't call it a "witch hunt" because a witch hunt is something that a powerful person does against a powerless person. The most powerful man in the world cannot be the object of a witch hunt.

Fact-checking is a terrible way to report on Donald Trump's lying . It's like we enter into a dialogue with him. It's as though, he says "A," and we check "A," and it gives it no context. Saying that he's "misstating" is an even worse way of covering it. That's NPR's ridiculous policy of not calling his lies "lies." It's really destructive.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.

As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children

I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. The working theory behind the intelligence report on Russian interference in the president election is that Russia influenced American public opinion. We may not like that, but if it influenced American public opinion, at least in the guise of legitimate activity - which is what the report says - then there's nothing you can do about that. Where it would be improper and illegal would be if there was actual collusion in those efforts. We don't know that.

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.