Jeyda

“Because I'm on the phone, Mom!"
"Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that?"
"Ahmadinejad."
"Oh, my goodness! What is he saying?"
"That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin's going too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going."
"Don't be so fresh, young man!"
"Gotta go," he says to me. "Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell."
"Fall back, solider. Over and out.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“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.”
― Anna Politkovskaya

“No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

“I am not anti-American,' he said. 'I just despise the current American administration. I despair that Bush has made ordinary, decent people all over the world think twice about what was once, and still could be again, a great country, when what happened on September 11th should have made ordinary, decent people all over the world embrace America as never before. I don't like it that neo-conservative politicians bully their so-called allies while playing to the worst, racist instincts of their own bewildered electorate. I don't like it that we live in an era where to be anti-war is to be anti-American, to be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Semitic, to be critical of Blair is somehow to be supportive of Putin and Chirac. All anybody is asking for in this so-called age of terror is some leadership. Yet everywhere you look in public life there is no truth, no courage, no dignity to speak of.”
― Charles Cumming, Typhoon