Top 50 Masha Gessen Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Masha Gessen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Most Russians believe they've never met an LGBT person

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.’
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
I would not attribute any strategic thinking to Trump.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
There aren’t a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
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.
Masha Gessen
Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.
Masha Gessen
Basically, Trump’s significant first moves have been twofold. To marginalize the media, and to start dismantling the federal government.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
Hate has a great unifying potential.
Masha Gessen
In war you’re either a collaborator or you’re a resistor. I mean you don’t get to be neutral.
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.
Masha Gessen
Where incompetence is prized, it is ever-present.
Masha Gessen
Dictators fall when they’re overconfident; they stay in power when they’re paranoid.
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.
Masha Gessen
Putin is an uneducated, unintelligent, uncultured man who has no plan.
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.
Masha Gessen
It’s very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.
Masha Gessen
I would much rather engage people in a conversation abo

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.
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
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.
Masha Gessen
Fact checking Donald Trump is a really… It is kind of fun but it is ungratifying because nothing checks out.
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.
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.
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
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.
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.
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.
Masha Gessen
There can be a conspiracy, but the presence of a conspiracy is actually not an excuse for conspiracy thinking.
Masha Gessen
Incomprehensible messaging is a very important part of Russian propaganda.
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.
Masha Gessen
When your doctor and neighbours and child’s schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
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.
Masha Gessen
I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn’t happen.
Masha Gessen