Quotes from Masha Gessen

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science."4

The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.

In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites -- in describing the brave as traitorous , the weak as frightening , and the good as bad -- and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.

The assault on language may be harder to define and describe than his attacks on institutions, but it is essential to his autocratic attempt, the ultimate objective of which is to obliterate politics.

When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality.

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.

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

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.

There was a game called "Work." and on of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.

Some studies actually showed that that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers. [Michelle Parsons] suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book "Dying Unneeded", argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for.

A constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity.

Trump's lies and his word piles both are exercises in arbitrariness, continued assertions of the power to say what he wants, when he wants, to usurp language itself, and with it, our ability to speak and act with others—in other words, our ability to engage in politics.