Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.”

— Timothy Snyder

52. “All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions.”

— Timothy Snyder

53. “Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted.”

— Timothy Snyder

54. “Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.”

— Timothy Snyder

55. “Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about – a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union – and take its side.”

— Timothy Snyder

56. “Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.”

— Timothy Snyder

57. “No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressor, the Germans always the victims.”

— Timothy Snyder

58. “Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”

— Timothy Snyder

59. “Listen for dangerous words.”

— Timothy Snyder

60. “Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”

— Timothy Snyder

61. “The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

62. “In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe. And indeed some of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the German task forces that perpetrated some of the murders, were tried at Nuremberg and later in West German courts. But even these trials were a kind of minimization of the scale of the crime. Not the SS commanders alone, but essentially all of the thousands of men who served under their command were murderers.”

— Timothy Snyder

63. “As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.”

— Timothy Snyder

64. “The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.”

— Timothy Snyder

65. “He places the sign in his window so that he can withdraw into daily life without trouble from the authorities. When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.”

— Timothy Snyder

66. “You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.”

— Timothy Snyder

67. “The one piece of information that best predicts whether Mr. Trump won or lost a county in November 2016 was the degree of opioid abuse.”

— Timothy Snyder

68. “If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.”

— Timothy Snyder

69. “When exactly was the “again” in the president’s slogan “Make America great again”? Hint: It is the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”

— Timothy Snyder

70. “It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time – those who did not change when the world around them did – whom we remember and admire today.”

— Timothy Snyder

71. “A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.57.”

— Timothy Snyder

72. “Christians might return to the foundational book, which as ever is very timely. Jesus preached that it “is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” We should be modest, for “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

— Timothy Snyder

73. “When states are absent, rights – by any definition – are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort.”

— Timothy Snyder

74. “Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory.”

— Timothy Snyder

75. “Hitler was not a German nationalist, sure of German victory, aiming for an enlarged German state. He was a zoological anarchist who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

76. “We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy – ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.”

— Timothy Snyder

77. “Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.”

— Timothy Snyder

78. “If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it. Professions.”

— Timothy Snyder

79. “It was easier to triumph in violence that it was to make a new order.”

— Timothy Snyder

80. “The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.”

— Timothy Snyder

81. “What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop’s proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.”

— Timothy Snyder

82. “By July 1933 it was illegal in Germany to belong to any other political party than the Nazis. In November the Nazis staged a parliamentary election in which.”

— Timothy Snyder

83. “A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”

— Timothy Snyder

84. “Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”

— Timothy Snyder

85. “The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

— Timothy Snyder

86. “Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become most dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.”

— Timothy Snyder

87. “An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.”

— Timothy Snyder

88. “Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

89. “Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.”

— Timothy Snyder

90. “To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

— Timothy Snyder

91. “The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.”

— Timothy Snyder

92. “History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”

— Timothy Snyder

93. “Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it.”

— Timothy Snyder

94. “More than any of the other new states that came into being at war’s end, Poland changed the balance of power in eastern Europe. It was not large enough to be a great power, but it was large enough to be a problem for any great power with plans of expansion. It separated Russia from Germany, for the first time in more than a century. Poland’s very existence created a buffer to both Russian and German power, and was much resented in Moscow and Berlin.”

— Timothy Snyder

95. “All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. The cynic who decides that there is no truth is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.”

— Timothy Snyder

96. “The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not then have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers.”

— Timothy Snyder

97. “Here, perhaps, is a purpose for history, somewhere between the record of death and its constant reinterpretation. Only a history of mass killing can unite the numbers and the memories. Without history, the memories become private, which today means national; and the numbers become public, which is to say an instrument in the international competition for martyrdom.”

— Timothy Snyder

98. “European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler. This, of course, was the shared binary logic of National Socialism and the Popular Front: Hitler called his enemies “Marxists,” and Stalin called his “fascists.”34 They agreed that there was no middle ground.”

— Timothy Snyder

99. “When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.”

— Timothy Snyder

100. “What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.”

— Timothy Snyder