Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.”

— Timothy Snyder

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— 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. “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

180. “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

181. “Most the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”

— Timothy Snyder

182. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

183. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

185. “Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”

— Timothy Snyder

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

189. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

190. “So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.”

— Timothy Snyder

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “Be wary of paramilitaries.”

— Timothy Snyder

195. “Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”

— Timothy Snyder

196. “Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems.”

— Timothy Snyder

197. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

199. “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

200. “Make sure you and your family have passports.”

— Timothy Snyder