Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

205. “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

206. “Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. 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

207. “So having a passport is not a sign of surrender. On the contrary, it is liberating, since it creates the possibility of new experiences. It allows us to see how other people, sometimes wiser than we, react to similar problems. Since so much of what has happened in the last year is familiar to the rest of the world or from recent history, we must observe and listen.”

— Timothy Snyder

208. “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

209. “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

210. “The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

— Timothy Snyder

211. “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

212. “Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.”

— Timothy Snyder

213. “Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies. As.”

— Timothy Snyder

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

217. “Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.”

— Timothy Snyder

218. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”

— Timothy Snyder

219. “Learn from peers in other countries.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

221. “In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. Communists required all such groups to be officially registered and transformed them into institutions of control.”

— Timothy Snyder

222. “We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. During.”

— Timothy Snyder

223. “In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.”

— Timothy Snyder

224. “In his 2016 campaign, the American president used the slogan “America First,” which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany.”

— Timothy Snyder

225. “The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. We.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

227. “Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”

— Timothy Snyder

228. “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

229. “For violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards. These first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military, and finally transform the police and military.”

— Timothy Snyder

230. “We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern.”

— Timothy Snyder

231. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

232. “For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For.”

— Timothy Snyder

233. “Practice corporeal politics.”

— Timothy Snyder

234. “Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

— Timothy Snyder

235. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

236. “A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well – and wishing that it would do better. Democracy.”

— Timothy Snyder

237. “The second mode is shamanistic incantation.”

— Timothy Snyder

238. “A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take. But those who followed the symbolic logic became victims in their turn. Having turned the poorer peasants against the richer, Soviet power then seized everyone’s land for the new collective farms.”

— Timothy Snyder

239. “Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.”

— Timothy Snyder

240. “There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream – as the tyrants themselves are defining.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

242. “By 1940 most Europeans had made their peace with the seemingly irresistible power of Nazi Germany. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.”

— Timothy Snyder

243. “Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No.”

— Timothy Snyder

244. “We do not see the minds that we hurt when we publish falsehoods, but that does not mean we do no harm.”

— Timothy Snyder

245. “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

246. “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

247. “Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

249. “Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

— Timothy Snyder

250. “The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”

— Timothy Snyder