Masha Gessen Quotes

Those traumas when it comes to the historical past generation to generation; our children, our grandchildren, our future grandchildren learn these behaviors. We have to know that they exist and we have to take care of those traumas and learn to heal from them. This movie shows that perspective from Scott's character, and I love it. It shows the American Indians as the ones who respect and help out when people are needed. It's a nice little twist.

In every generation, there are horrors that define an age and events that scar the global conscience.

America's a very traumatized society.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Viewing Israelis and Palestinians from a psychological perspective, they would both be seen as victims of abuse; that is how they both understandably feel, and it's how they both understandably behave. The Jewish psyche is in victimized reaction to the Holocaust, and the Palestinian psyche is in victimized reaction to the Israelis.

Our long memories hold the stories of what our people accomplished, but they also hold the prejudices, the injustices, the harm that we've received from others.

Growing up with my mother who grew up during World War II being half Filipina, half Okinawan, and literally running around the jungles in the Philippines escaping Japanese military chasing after them - I grew up with what they deem now as trauma, generational trauma.

I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.

There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

When I remember my life in Russia it is in totally dark colours.

Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness.

Look around at the countries of Europe, and you'll find that practically all of them have pasts that are just as tragic as Ireland's, yet the people seem able to find some creative way at moving into the future.

When a state embroils its citizens in an “either you are with us or against us” argument, every dissent is at risk of being equated to treason—or in an Islamic country, blasphemy.

Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

… new authoritarians are conducting an epoch-making historical experiment as to whether regimes that allow private freedoms can endure when they deny their citizens public freedom.

Revolutions in Russia are even worse than bad czars.

In Eastern Europe, the past is not only always hovering over the present, it is not even passed. It waits, like some malevolent caged beast, ready at any moment to escape and bring back all the horrors.

The trauma of South Asian people escapes the confines of our own times. We're not just healing from what's been inflicted onto us as children... it is generations of pain embedded into our souls.

It will take 150 years or seven generations to heal the wound of the residential school.

The Khmer Rouge tried to delete everything. They tried to erase our past, our personality, our land, our sentiment. What we tried to do in 'The Missing Picture' was to reconstruct our identity, to bring it back to the people through cinema.