Top 50 Anne Applebaum Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”3 Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code.”

— Anne Applebaum

2. “People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.”

— Anne Applebaum

3. “The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth.”

— Anne Applebaum

4. “The evolution of a bourgeoisie is a healthy phenomenon when it grows and prospers thanks to bourgeois values: hard work, honesty, personal responsibility.”

— Anne Applebaum

5. “A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.”

— Anne Applebaum

6. “Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”

— Anne Applebaum

7. “Plato feared the “false and braggart words” of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.”

— Anne Applebaum

8. “Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.”

— Anne Applebaum

9. “If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And.”

— Anne Applebaum

10. “The reasoning, as far as I could see, being that the young would recover and have work left in them, while the old were not worth saving.”

— Anne Applebaum

11. “Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group – all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people:.”

— Anne Applebaum

12. “Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It.”

— Anne Applebaum

13. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not – all will walk. Those who can’t walk – we will shoot.”

— Anne Applebaum

14. “Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost.”

— Anne Applebaum

15. “But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of ‘fascist’ eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word ‘fascist,’ in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed. p.86.”

— Anne Applebaum

16. “Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them – even if that means a loss of freedom.”

— Anne Applebaum

17. “Arendt’s “totalitarian personality,” the “completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”

— Anne Applebaum

18. “Although the definition of an ‘enemy of the state’ changed over time, the mechanisms to deal with these enemies were put in place right at the very beginning.”

— Anne Applebaum

19. “Most of the time, however, the cruelty of Soviet camp guards was unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty, of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep.”

— Anne Applebaum

20. “The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out ‘reforms,’ even when they personally had nothing to do with the past crimes.”

— Anne Applebaum

21. “It is an argument for moral equivalence, an argument that undermines faith, hope, and the belief that we can live up to the language of our Constitution.”

— Anne Applebaum

22. “Reagan called on Americans to unify not around blood and soil but around the Constitution: “As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.”

— Anne Applebaum

23. “In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided.”

— Anne Applebaum

24. “One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism.”

— Anne Applebaum

25. “This way of speaking – “Putin is a killer, but so are we all” – mirrors Putin’s own propaganda, which often states, in so many words, “Okay, Russia is corrupt, but so is everyone else.”

— Anne Applebaum

26. “As time went on, the communist attack on civil society would change and become more sophisticated. In order to create competition for authentic civil society, the regimes would create ersatz ‘official’ civic groups, organizations that sometimes looked independent but were in fact controlled by the state.”

— Anne Applebaum

27. “This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.”

— Anne Applebaum

28. “The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.”

— Anne Applebaum

29. “Some sang because they were afraid not to sing. But quite a few of them simply didn’t listen to the words or weren’t interested in them. Indeed, many of those who clapped at the leaders’ speeches, or who mouthed slogans at meetings, or who marched in May Day parades did so with a certain odd ambivalence.”

— Anne Applebaum

30. “We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be “complex and frightening,” as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.”

— Anne Applebaum

31. “The far left’s mockery of the competitive institutions of “bourgeois democracy” and capitalism, its cynicism about the possibility of any objectivity in the media, the civil service, or the judiciary, has long had a right-wing version too. Hitler’s Germany is the example usually given. But there are many others, from Franco’s Spain to Pinochet’s Chile.”

— Anne Applebaum

32. “The incident illustrates the distinct absence of a communist sense of humor.”

— Anne Applebaum

33. “Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies.”

— Anne Applebaum

34. “Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.”

— Anne Applebaum

35. “Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”

— Anne Applebaum

36. “There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.”

— Anne Applebaum

37. “When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule – who is the elite – is never over.”

— Anne Applebaum

38. “The point of all of these changes was not to make government run better. The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party.”

— Anne Applebaum

39. “The founders themselves were not so certain: their beloved classical authors taught them that history was circular, that human nature was flawed, and that special measures were needed to prevent democracy from sliding back into tyranny.”

— Anne Applebaum

40. “The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.”

— Anne Applebaum

41. “It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity – diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences – therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.”

— Anne Applebaum

42. “When people say they are angry about “immigration,” in other words, they are not always talking about something they have lived and experienced. They are talking about something imaginary, something they fear.”

— Anne Applebaum

43. “Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.”

— Anne Applebaum

44. “Modern democratic institutions, built for an era with very different information technology, provide little comfort for those who are angered by the dissonance. Voting, campaigning, the formation of coalitions – all of this seems retrograde in a world where other things happen so quickly.”

— Anne Applebaum

45. “But even in countries that were never occupied by the Red Army and never ruled by Latin American populists, democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. The losers of these competitions were always, sooner or later, going to challenge the value of the competition itself.”

— Anne Applebaum

46. “Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.”

— Anne Applebaum

47. “Were a new Dante to come among us, he could write a new Inferno after visiting one of these railway stations.”

— Anne Applebaum

48. “This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced.”

— Anne Applebaum

49. “Soviet joke about the terrible anxiety Ivan and his wife Masha experienced when the knock on the door came – and their relief when they learned it was only the neighbor come to tell them that the building was on fire.”

— Anne Applebaum

50. “In general, women who were able to sew or to quilt were able to earn extra bread rations, so coveted were even the slightest improvements to the standard uniform: the ability to distinguish oneself, to look slightly better than others, would become, as we shall see, associated with higher rank, better health, greater privilege.”

— Anne Applebaum