136 Quotes by Masha Gessen

Little Octobrists are future Young Pioneers. Little Octobrists are studious kids. They study hard, love school, and respect their elders. Little Octobrists are honest and truthful kids. Little Octobrists are fun-loving kids. They read and they draw, they play and they sing, and they stick together. Only those who work hard and persist earn the right to be called Little Octobrist.2.

A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen.

What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it.

There is a reason that Russian troops in both Moscow and Beslan acted in ways that maximized bloodshed; they actually aimed to maximize the fear and the horror. This is the classic modus operandi of terrorists, and in this sense it can certainly be said that Putin and the terrorists were acting in concert.

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.

The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it – while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show “I can say what I want when I want to.” The power lie conjures a different reality and demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands:.

If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal.

But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs.

We relate to the virus, in some ways, as we relate to Trump. We yearn desperately to return to a time of imagined normalcy, before Trump and before the coronavirus. But we can heal only by looking forward – perhaps to a life that will be slower, more environmentally responsible and less materially comfortable, but also more clearly rooted in mutual aid and the understanding of our fundamental equality and interdependence.