Masha Gessen Quotes

#1. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty,

Masha Gessen

#2. No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence.

Masha Gessen

#3. To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast.

Masha Gessen

#4. Are you putting on airs?

Masha Gessen

#5. They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies.

Masha Gessen

#6. It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At

Masha Gessen

#7. The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.

Masha Gessen

#8. The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.

Masha Gessen

#9. Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.

Masha Gessen

#10. It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

Masha Gessen

#11. 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.

Masha Gessen

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

Masha Gessen

#13. The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine.

Masha Gessen

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

Masha Gessen

#15. such as first-grader Vladimir's sporting a wristwatch,

Masha Gessen

#16. Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire.

Masha Gessen

#17. Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth.

Masha Gessen

#18. Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,' Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin.

Masha Gessen

#19. Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote, "So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement."

[Nadya Tolokonnikova's closing statement]

Masha Gessen

#20. Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt.

Masha Gessen

#21. Angleterre Hotel,

Masha Gessen

#22. It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

Masha Gessen

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

Masha Gessen

#24. Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art -- something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts -- a great work of art is always a miracle.

Masha Gessen