QUOTES by Masha Gessen
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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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
Abstracted hatred is incredibly potent. There's never the risk of having it challenged by the reality of living human beings.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.'
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
There can be a conspiracy, but the presence of a conspiracy is actually not an excuse for conspiracy thinking.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote 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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
I think Putin's popularity was genuine when he first came to power. He was seen as a welcome relief from the Yeltsin era.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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?
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
Poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
It's very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen
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.
Quote by -Masha Gessen