Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.”

— Timothy Snyder

102. “The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.”

— Timothy Snyder

103. “As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: “Any of the comrades who can’t see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we’ll have to feed.”4.”

— Timothy Snyder

104. “He walked upon ‘earth that is as unsteady as the sea,’ and found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery a sack of hair, blonde and black.”

— Timothy Snyder

105. “Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States – fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.”

— Timothy Snyder

106. “Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.”

— Timothy Snyder

107. “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. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation.”

— Timothy Snyder

108. “Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

109. “The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.”

— Timothy Snyder

110. “Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.”

— Timothy Snyder

111. “The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler... this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.”

— Timothy Snyder

112. “The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.”

— Timothy Snyder

113. “Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.”

— Timothy Snyder

114. “Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.”

— Timothy Snyder

115. “When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”

— Timothy Snyder

116. “Hitler and Stalin both accepted a late-nineteenth-century Darwinistic modification: progress was possible, but only as a result of violent struggle between races or classes.”

— Timothy Snyder

117. “Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.”

— Timothy Snyder

118. “Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00447.51.”

— Timothy Snyder

119. “Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.”

— Timothy Snyder

120. “A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.”

— Timothy Snyder

121. “Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others.”

— Timothy Snyder

122. “Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same. –.”

— Timothy Snyder

123. “They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.55.”

— Timothy Snyder

124. “In the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, NKVD officers recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them peasants or members of national minorities.”

— Timothy Snyder

125. “The Nazis treated health care as a way to divide the humans from the subhumans and nonhumans. If we see others as bearers of ailments and ourselves as healthy victims, we are little better than they. If we truly oppose the Nazi evil, we will try to think our way to its opposite, to the good. A part of that effort is to understand that all humans are subject to malady, and have an equal claim to care.”

— Timothy Snyder

126. “The nation faces forward. It is made and remade every day. If we believe that the nation resides in the orderly recitations of history given to us by our leaders, then our story is over.”

— Timothy Snyder

127. “In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs – a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.”

— Timothy Snyder

128. “All citizens do have a measure of control, at least in democracies where their votes are counted, of how they belong to their nations. Perhaps they will have more confidence in unconventional choices if they see that each nation’s founders were disobedient and unpredictable, men and women of imagination and ambition. The steel of every national monument was once molten.”

— Timothy Snyder

129. “It is the government’s job to increase both freedom and security.”

— Timothy Snyder

130. “When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.”

— Timothy Snyder

131. “When politicians today invoke terrorism they are speaking, of course, of an actual danger. But when they try to train us to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two. Sometimes we do indeed gain one by losing the other, and sometimes not. People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.”

— Timothy Snyder

132. “Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”

— Timothy Snyder

133. “If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.”

— Timothy Snyder

134. “Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”

— Timothy Snyder

135. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”

— Timothy Snyder

136. “In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two. In 2020 he told on average about twenty-seven lies a day.”

— Timothy Snyder

137. “Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change.”

— Timothy Snyder

138. “People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. You.”

— Timothy Snyder

139. “We are in the presence,” said Winston Churchill, “of a crime without a name.” Its perpetrators were human beings, operating with initiative and creativity in political circumstances of their own making. State destruction did not alter politics, but rather created a new form of politics, which enabled a new kind of crime. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

140. “Remember that email is skywriting.”

— Timothy Snyder

141. “The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. 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. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When.”

— Timothy Snyder

142. “Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.”

— Timothy Snyder

143. “The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.”

— Timothy Snyder

144. “If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one, great bloody accident.”

— Timothy Snyder

145. “Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.”

— Timothy Snyder

146. “The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.”

— Timothy Snyder

147. “The German communist party, for years the strongest outside the Soviet Union itself, was broken in a matter of a few months. Its defeat was a serious blow to the prestige of the international communist movement.11.”

— Timothy Snyder

148. “If past and future contained nothing but struggle and scarcity, all attention fell upon the present. A psychic resolve for relief from a sense of crisis overwhelmed the practical resolve to think about the future. Rather.”

— Timothy Snyder

149. “The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission.”

— Timothy Snyder

150. “Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny.”

— Timothy Snyder