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“To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites -- in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad -- and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art -- something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts -- a great work of art is always a miracle.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“One more thing: the regime is a show that conceals what in reality is chaos. What looks orderly and restrictive is in fact disorganized and inefficient. Obviously, this does not lead to order. On the contrary, people feel acutely lost, in time and space among other things. As everywhere in the country, a person does not know where to go with a particular problem. So he goes to the head of the detention facility. That’s like taking your problem to Putin outside of jail. When we describe the system in our lyricsâ€� I guess you could say we are not really opposedâ€� We are in opposition to Putinist chaos, which is a regime in name only. When”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutionsâ€� general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children’s forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words. I”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote, "So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement."

[Nadya Tolokonnikova's closing statement]”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,' Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“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.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“It was not the artists' or the politicians' fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union's fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad—and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," or Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," which preceded it. In Zamyatin's utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: "Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State," Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after this death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.â€� We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.â€� Nadya”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“In the collective prosecutorial mind our apologies are also apparently characterized as “so-called.â€� Though I find this insulting. It causes me suffering and moral harm. Because our apologies were sincere. I am so sad that we have said so many words and you have not understood any of them. Or are you lying when you talk of our apologies as though they were insincere? I don’t understand: What more do you need to hear? For me, only this trial can rightly be referred to as “so-called.â€� And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of lies and fictions and of poorly coded deception in the verdict of this so-called court, because all you can do is take away my so-called freedom, the only sort that exists in the Russian Federation. But no one can take away my inner freedom. It lives in my words and it will survive thanks to the public nature of my statements, which will be heard and read by thousands. This freedom is already multiplying, thanks to every caring person who hears us in this country. Thanks to everyone who has found splinters of this trial in themselves, as Franz Kafka and Guy Debord once did. I believe that openness and public speech and a hunger for the truth make us all a little bit freeer. We will see this yet. The”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

“Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth.”
― Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot