Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.”

— Timothy Snyder

202. “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

203. “For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.”

— Timothy Snyder

204. “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

205. “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

206. “It took less than a year for the new Nazi order to consolidate. By the end of 1933, Germany had become a one-party state in which all major institutions had been humbled.”

— Timothy Snyder

207. “Be wary of paramilitaries.”

— Timothy Snyder

208. “The capacity for trust and learning can make life seem less chaotic and mysterious, and democratic politics more plausible and attractive.”

— Timothy Snyder

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.”

— Timothy Snyder

212. “When we learn them from a screen, however, we tend to be drawn in by the logic of spectacle. When we learn of one scandal, it whets our appetite for the next.”

— Timothy Snyder

213. “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

214. “Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Yet in his vast histories and memoirs, he presented his own decisions as self-evident, and credited the British people and Britain’s allies. Today what Churchill did seems normal, and right. But at the time he had to stand out.”

— Timothy Snyder

215. “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

216. “We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

218. “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

219. “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

220. “It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It.”

— Timothy Snyder

221. “The authoritarians of today are also terror managers, and if anything they are rather more creative. Consider the current Russian regime, so admired by the president. Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire, he then used a series of terror attacks – real, questionable, and fake – to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

224. “Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time – those who did not change when the world around them did – whom we remember and admire today.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

226. “Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.”

— Timothy Snyder

227. “Practice corporeal politics.”

— Timothy Snyder

228. “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. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of “doublethink.”

— Timothy Snyder

229. “More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

232. “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

233. “What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As.”

— Timothy Snyder

234. “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

235. “A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well – and wishing that it would do better.”

— Timothy Snyder

236. “Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. 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

237. “If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.”

— Timothy Snyder

238. “Rather than reporting the violation of basic rights, our media generally preferred to mindlessly indulge the inherently salacious interest we have in other people’s affairs.”

— Timothy Snyder

239. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

240. “Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”

— Timothy Snyder

241. “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

242. “Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant. During.”

— Timothy Snyder

243. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

245. “When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

246. “The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds.”

— Timothy Snyder

247. “A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.”

— Timothy Snyder

248. “Collectivization, when completed, brought starvation to much of the Soviet peasantry. Millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia died horrible and humiliating deaths between 1930 and 1933. Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.”

— Timothy Snyder

249. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”

— Timothy Snyder

250. “After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989–91, we imbibed the myth of an “end of history.” In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.”

— Timothy Snyder