Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”

— Timothy Snyder

2. “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

— Timothy Snyder

3. “Do not obey in advance.”

— Timothy Snyder

4. “Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.”

— Timothy Snyder

5. “Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even.”

— Timothy Snyder

6. “In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.”

— Timothy Snyder

7. “We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy... We imbibed the myth of an “end of history”. In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.”

— Timothy Snyder

8. “What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.”

— Timothy Snyder

9. “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

— Timothy Snyder

10. “Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

11. “Be reflective if you must be armed.”

— Timothy Snyder

12. “If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.”

— Timothy Snyder

13. “Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.”

— Timothy Snyder

14. “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

— Timothy Snyder

15. “It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.”

— Timothy Snyder

16. “Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”

— Timothy Snyder

17. “We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Our own tradition demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”

— Timothy Snyder

18. “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual – and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.”

— Timothy Snyder

19. “For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.”

— Timothy Snyder

20. “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie,” wrote Havel, “then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”

— Timothy Snyder

21. “Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.”

— Timothy Snyder

22. “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”

— Timothy Snyder

23. “A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency.”

— Timothy Snyder

24. “Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.”

— Timothy Snyder

25. “Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

— Timothy Snyder

26. “Inevitability and eternity have specific propaganda styles. Inevitability politicians spin facts into a web of well-being. Eternity politicians suppress facts in order to dismiss the reality that people are freer and richer in other countries, and the idea that reforms could be formulated on the basis of knowledge.”

— Timothy Snyder

27. “The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions – even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.”

— Timothy Snyder

28. “Like all immorality, eternity politics begins by making an exception for itself. All else in creation might be evil, but I and my group are good, because I am myself and my group is mine.”

— Timothy Snyder

29. “For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.”

— Timothy Snyder

30. “Make new friends and march with them. For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends.”

— Timothy Snyder

31. “A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.”

— Timothy Snyder

32. “During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.”

— Timothy Snyder

33. “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”

— Timothy Snyder

34. “Stalin raised a toast: “We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts – yes, his thoughts! – threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”29.”

— Timothy Snyder

35. “Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.”

— Timothy Snyder

36. “Those who accept eternity politics do not expect to live longer, happier, or more fruitful lives. They accept suffering as a mark of righteousness if they think that guilty others are suffering more. Life is nasty, brutish, and short; the pleasure of life is that it can be made nastier, more brutish, and shorter for others.”

— Timothy Snyder

37. “The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere.”

— Timothy Snyder

38. “One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.”

— Timothy Snyder

39. “Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.”

— Timothy Snyder

40. “When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning.”

— Timothy Snyder

41. “In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.”

— Timothy Snyder

42. “The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So.”

— Timothy Snyder

43. “In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.”

— Timothy Snyder

44. “Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30.”

— Timothy Snyder

45. “Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.”

— Timothy Snyder

46. “In the most dangerous of times, those who escape and survive generally know people whom they can trust. Having old friends is the politics of lost resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change.”

— Timothy Snyder

47. “When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading.”

— Timothy Snyder

48. “Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.”

— Timothy Snyder

49. “The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.”

— Timothy Snyder

50. “Is truth nothing more than a convention of power, or can truthful historical accounts resist the gravity of politics?”

— Timothy Snyder