Activist Quote by Masha Gessen

“You can't expect people who didn't exist as a community at all until about twenty years ago to have formed a political movement. This attack on the LGBT community was very shocking to the people who consider themselves to be activists. They're basically playing in the sandbox, and there's a tank coming! And what are they supposed to do - use the plastic shovel to push the tank back? But since the homosexual propaganda legislation, people have really stepped up, educated themselves politically, and grown by leaps and bounds.”

Masha Gessen

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More by Masha Gessen

There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend…

Masha Gessen

Where incompetence is prized, it is ever-present.

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Pussy Riot have certainly changed some people's assumptions about the role of political art and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the church. That's…

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Trump, like Putin, has a demonstrably thin skin and short temper when it comes to being criticized by journalists.

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You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

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Donald Trump creates word salads. And that is awful to language, because we try to parse out what he's saying and try to find…

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It is the first time since 1993 that Russians have come out into the streets without an explicit permission from the government to do so. The main difference between the protests of 2011-2012 and these protests today is that they didn't have permits. These were - the people who were coming out into the streets were very young people, for…

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I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.

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In the 1990s, there was a lot of reform, and there was a lot of forward movement on a lot of fronts in Russia.…

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Poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies.

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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…

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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…

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Explore all 171 Masha Gessen quotes

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I have never been an activist for anything.

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When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government, the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp.…

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Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses…

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