To effectively create the image of an enemy you have to show first of all that the enemy is extremely dangerous, but on the other hand less than human.

First of all, radical beliefs are not a predictor of terrorist behavior: most people who hold radical beliefs never become terrorists, and some terrorists don't hold radical beliefs.

It is so impossible to predict how much influence what you write will have, and what sorts of anxieties and imaginaries it will tap into.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.

Fact checking Donald Trump is a really... It is kind of fun but it is ungratifying because nothing checks out.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.

To exercise ignorance, racist prejudice, a love of power and total disregard for factual accuracy, one has to inhabit a world where everything can mean anything and nothing is certain.

My family immigrated to the States in 1981, when I was 14.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of reform, and there was a lot of forward movement on a lot of fronts in Russia. There was fundamental economic reform. There was a new constitution and an electoral system built from scratch. But the judicial system was probably the most difficult to reform.

I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called 'vegetarian,' experience of migration. It involved planes and trains - the actual compartments of passenger trains - and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.

The most difficult and, in some ways, the most rewarding thing I've ever been through was emigrating as a teenager.

I realized - I've been an opposition journalist in Russia for a long time. And I've often considered how real risks are and how much of a risk I can take.

There are a couple of ways to use the word democracy, and the way that I think is productive is to think about democracy as not a state that can actually be achieved, but as an ideal.

Donald Trump ran for autocrat, he didn't run for president. The first thing in autocrat does is take over the media, or alienate the media, which is what Trump is doing, he is doing it actively.

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

You know, I don't walk home alone at night. If I drive into our courtyard after dark, I ask my partner to come outside with the dog to meet me. Those are, you know, basic sort of urban precautions.

I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.

Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.

Of course, Putin may well have reasons for wanting Trump to be president - not least Trump's apparent skepticism toward NATO and his lack of opposition to Russia's military interventions in Ukraine and Syria.

In 'Chernobyl,' which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film - or, for that matter, in Russian television or film.

Most Russians actually were living much better by the end of the 1990s than by the beginning of the 1990s. Most Russians were no longer confronting food shortages.

There is no law that guarantees press access to the White House. Communication was lessening during the Obama years. There was every reason to suspect that Trump was going to create an adversarial relationship and that people were going to be faced with the impossible dilemma between sort-of-complicity and access.

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.