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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

254. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

255. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

257. “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

258. “We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.”

— Timothy Snyder

259. “Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything.”

— Timothy Snyder

260. “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

261. “The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.”

— Timothy Snyder

262. “Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one.”

— Timothy Snyder

263. “Germany then remained in a state of emergency for the next twelve years, until the end of the Second World War. Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world.”

— Timothy Snyder

264. “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

265. “Accepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future.”

— Timothy Snyder

266. “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

267. “The seduction by a mythicized pas prevents us from thinking about possible futures.”

— Timothy Snyder

268. “Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

269. “Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you.”

— Timothy Snyder

270. “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

271. “It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

272. “Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

274. “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.”

— Timothy Snyder

275. “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

276. “You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent. In Nazi Germany in 1933, people wore lapel pins that said “Yes” during the elections and referendum that confirmed the one-party state.”

— Timothy Snyder

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

299. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder