Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. A.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

153. “This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.”

— Timothy Snyder

154. “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

155. “But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”

— Timothy Snyder

156. “Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar.”

— Timothy Snyder

157. “Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.”

— Timothy Snyder

158. “So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.”

— Timothy Snyder

159. “Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We.”

— Timothy Snyder

160. “James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.”

— Timothy Snyder

161. “Those who advocated Brexit, the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, imagined a British nation-state, though such a thing never existed. There was a British Empire, and then there was Britain as a member of the European Union. The move to separate from the EU is not a step backward onto firm ground, but a leap into the unknown.”

— Timothy Snyder

162. “Take responsibility for the face of the world.”

— Timothy Snyder

163. “The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. –.”

— Timothy Snyder

164. “They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”

— Timothy Snyder

165. “Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

166. “The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.”

— Timothy Snyder

167. “Beware the one-party state.”

— Timothy Snyder

168. “The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence.”

— Timothy Snyder

169. “As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.”

— Timothy Snyder

170. “Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

— Timothy Snyder

171. “If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If.”

— Timothy Snyder

172. “After the Reichstag fire, Hannah Arendt wrote that “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.”

— Timothy Snyder

173. “If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”

— Timothy Snyder

174. “In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress.”

— Timothy Snyder

175. “The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.”

— Timothy Snyder

176. “One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

— Timothy Snyder

177. “Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If.”

— Timothy Snyder

178. “The second mode is shamanistic incantation.”

— Timothy Snyder

179. “Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle.”

— Timothy Snyder

180. “Ionesco’s aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.”

— Timothy Snyder

181. “When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, Great Britain was alone. The British had won no meaningful battles and had no important allies.”

— Timothy Snyder

182. “The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.”

— Timothy Snyder

183. “Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark.”

— Timothy Snyder

184. “The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible.”

— Timothy Snyder

185. “The choice to be public depends on the ability to maintain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.”

— Timothy Snyder

186. “When fascists or Nazis or communists did well in elections in the 1930s or ’40s, what followed was some combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics – slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

187. “The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that.”

— Timothy Snyder

188. “The Russian anti-gay campaign, which associates European and American power with the hidden hand of the gay international, was targeted to the Muslim world as well as to domestic constituencies. These.”

— Timothy Snyder

189. “Learn from peers in other countries.”

— Timothy Snyder

190. “WE TEND TO assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

192. “It is gratifying to know that, whatever the course of events, you are helping others to do good. Many of us can afford to support some part of the vast network of charities that one of our former presidents called “a thousand points of light.” Those points of light are best seen, like stars at dusk, against a darkening sky.”

— Timothy Snyder

193. “History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.”

— Timothy Snyder

194. “It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult.”

— Timothy Snyder

195. “To forbid analogies makes the Holocaust irrelevant to future generations. If an American child can identify with Anne Frank, an American child might ask what it is like for immigrant children to be separated from their parents. To forbid analogies is to forbid learning, and to forbid empathizing. That, sadly, is the point.”

— Timothy Snyder

196. “Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.”

— Timothy Snyder

197. “Having old friends is the politics of last resort.”

— Timothy Snyder

198. “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.” Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth.”

— Timothy Snyder

199. “What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion.”

— Timothy Snyder

200. “At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation.”

— Timothy Snyder