A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

One of the things that I really value about Russian culture is that on the private level it allows for a huge amount of variety and individuality with regards to family structure.

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

We all look. The lucky find. The wise accept.

There's a fine line between stubbornness and the positive side of that, which is dogged determination.

While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.

Broke is normal. Why be normal?

I want to be mayor, but I don’t need to be mayor. I’m not a career politician.

I can play rhythm guitar. I know how to hold a guitar and strum it.

I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.

We all love to see excellence as a fan, and I am a fan now watching excellence in the Rangers net.

Amplifying acoustic instruments more than a little is really cheating, and everything becomes a compromise.

The cream-tiled walls were spattered here and there with old dried bloodstains, deep gouges that might have been clawmarks, and all kinds of graffiti. As usual, someone had spelt Cthulhu wrongly.