Masha Gessen Quotes

We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.

When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

Fidel Castro's most scandalous show trial was not mounted against a political figure but against a writer: Heberto Padilla. In 1971, after 38 days of detention, Mr. Padilla was forced to 'confess' at the Cuban writers' union to the charges of 'subversive activities.'

While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

Putin regards me as the most dangerous person, and when they were releasing me from jail, the only condition was that I leave the country. And when they did push me out of the country, to make sure that I wouldn't come back, they opened up a criminal case against me - a new one.

If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?

After the 1960 royal coup, I spent time in India - including three years in prison.

It's very clear that the Bush Administration is out of control. It contains some truly dangerous people.

I was first imprisoned in Pretoria, and then, thereafter, I was taken to Robben Island. I stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was taken back to Pretoria when I was charged in the Rivonia trial, when I was then sent to Robben Island for life.

Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

The Russian spirit, wedded as it is to the idea of uniformity, cannot achieve genuine order. The nature of its government is interference, negligence and corruption.

It is a crime now in my country to talk about the government's crimes.

When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.

We have more billionaires than any country but the United States. And Putin can imprison any one of them at a moment’s notice. Do you think he is poor?

Germany is a despotism, with mock constitutionalism. There is the dictature of capitalism represented by junkerdom, militarism, and police. All independent organizations of working men were forbidden.

We are not allowed to refer to certain things that he does not like.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

I've made enough jokes about Iran's leadership that I'm sure if I showed up that I would get a nice escort - to the main prison - and then I could do a show there.

Than Shwe ordered the confiscation of all cell phones and laptops and computers so no reportage could come out of Burma. It seemed clear that a demon, something diabolical, rather than something compassionate and human was in charge of Burma.

The people are really afraid of what's going on in Russia; they are suffering with fear, sitting at home, doors locked, because they are afraid of their government.

The big insight that I have, not so much from writing 'Red Notice' but from living as the main character of 'Red Notice', is that Russia was and is a criminal state unlike any other sovereign country.

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial -whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.