Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible.”

— Timothy Snyder

152. “Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song.”

— 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. “Before you deride the “mainstream media,” note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult. So try for yourself to write a proper article, involving work in the real world: traveling, interviewing, maintaining relationships with sources, researching in written records, verifying everything, writing and revising drafts, all on a tight and unforgiving schedule.”

— Timothy Snyder

155. “These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena.”

— Timothy Snyder

156. “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

157. “Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany of the 1930s, of the Soviet Union during the Great Terror of 1937–38, or of the purges in communist eastern Europe in the 1940s and ’50s, people who were living in fear of repression remembered how their neighbors treated them. A smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting – banal gestures in a normal situation – took on great significance.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “Beware the one-party state.”

— Timothy Snyder

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

181. “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

182. “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. We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks.”

— Timothy Snyder

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.”

— Timothy Snyder

187. “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

188. “The danger we now face is of a passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, from a naive and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy.”

— Timothy Snyder

189. “Our time is certainly out of joint. We have forgotten history for one reason and, if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another. We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty.”

— Timothy Snyder

190. “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. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this – but we still can.”

— Timothy Snyder

191. “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

192. “If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will.”

— Timothy Snyder

193. “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”.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

195. “If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance – and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

196. “To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the co-creator of another.”

— Timothy Snyder

197. “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

198. “Learn from peers in other countries.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

200. “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