Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hate has a great unifying potential.
Where incompetence is prized, it is ever-present.
Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.
As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children
I would not attribute any strategic thinking to Trump.
I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.
I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.
Putin is an uneducated, unintelligent, uncultured man who has no plan.
Incomprehensible messaging is a very important part of Russian propaganda.
I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.
Dictators fall when they're overconfident; they stay in power when they're paranoid.
I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.
It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.
It's very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.
In war you're either a collaborator or you're a resistor. I mean you don't get to be neutral.
Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority - not the capture of moral high ground.
There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.
I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.
When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.
You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.
The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.
Fact checking Donald Trump is a really... It is kind of fun but it is ungratifying because nothing checks out.
There can be a conspiracy, but the presence of a conspiracy is actually not an excuse for conspiracy thinking.
Trump, like Putin, has a demonstrably thin skin and short temper when it comes to being criticized by journalists.
When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.
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.
A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.
I think Putin's popularity was genuine when he first came to power. He was seen as a welcome relief from the Yeltsin era.
Abstracted hatred is incredibly potent. There's never the risk of having it challenged by the reality of living human beings.
Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.
Basically, Trump's significant first moves have been twofold. To marginalize the media, and to start dismantling the federal government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.
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.
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.
Poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies.
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.
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.