Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Frank claimed that law was meant to serve the race, and so what seemed good for the race was therefore the law. With arguments like this, German lawyers could convince themselves that laws and rules were there to serve their projects of conquest and destruction, rather than to hinder them.”

— Timothy Snyder

253. “When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”

— Timothy Snyder

254. “Make new friends and march with them.”

— Timothy Snyder

255. “Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

257. “Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation. National.”

— Timothy Snyder

258. “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

259. “What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others.”

— Timothy Snyder

260. “If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And.”

— Timothy Snyder

261. “We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free.”

— Timothy Snyder

262. “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

263. “When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.”

— Timothy Snyder

264. “Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In.”

— Timothy Snyder

265. “The Great Terror took place during a state of exception that required all policemen to subordinate themselves to the NKVD and its special tasks.”

— Timothy Snyder

266. “Take responsibility for what you communicate with others. “What is truth?”

— Timothy Snyder

267. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

269. “If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you.”

— Timothy Snyder

270. “Adolf Hitler had no special animus toward Britain or its empire, and indeed imagined a division of the world into spheres of interests. He expected Churchill to come to terms after the fall of France. Churchill did not. He told the French that “whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.”

— Timothy Snyder

271. “Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.”

— Timothy Snyder

272. “It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies.”

— Timothy Snyder

273. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

274. “If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world. –.”

— Timothy Snyder

275. “It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well.”

— Timothy Snyder

276. “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

277. “When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.”

— Timothy Snyder

278. “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

279. “Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less.”

— Timothy Snyder

280. “Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation.”

— Timothy Snyder

281. “The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

— Timothy Snyder

282. “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

283. “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

284. “The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself.”

— Timothy Snyder

285. “History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”

— Timothy Snyder

286. “In April 2015, Russian hackers took over the transmission of a French television station, pretended to be ISIS, and then broadcast material designed to terrorize France.”

— Timothy Snyder

287. “Make eye contact and small talk.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

290. “We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.”

— Timothy Snyder

291. “Teresa now observed that people quietly allowed their Jewish friends to slip away from their lives.”

— Timothy Snyder

292. “The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction.”

— Timothy Snyder

293. “An 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 in the 1930s. Steve Bannon promised policies that would be “as exciting as the 1930s.” When exactly was the “again” in the slogan “Make America great again”? It is, sadly, the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”

— Timothy Snyder

294. “We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero invetsment? We get what we pay for.”

— Timothy Snyder

295. “The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law. Because.”

— Timothy Snyder

296. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

298. “Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

300. “When we think of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, we imagine Auschwitz and mechanized impersonal death. This was a convenient way for Germans to remember the Holocaust, since they could claim that few of them had known exactly what had happened behind those gates. In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe.”

— Timothy Snyder