Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

208. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

210. “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

211. “Practice corporeal politics.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

213. “Every man has a name given by the stars given by his neighbors. – ZELDA MISHKOVSKY, 1974.”

— Timothy Snyder

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

220. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

226. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

231. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

237. “Extremism’ certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word ‘terrorism’ in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. 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 that mainstream at that particular moment.”

— Timothy Snyder

238. “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

239. “Be wary of paramilitaries.”

— Timothy Snyder

240. “Make eye contact and small talk.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

242. “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

243. “The move to separate from the EU is not a step backward onto firm ground, but a leap into the unknown.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

245. “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

246. “What matters is that this spectacular act of terror initiated the politics of emergency. Gazing.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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