Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

258. “It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf.”

— Timothy Snyder

259. “If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.”

— Timothy Snyder

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like.”

— Timothy Snyder

265. “You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

266. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

268. “The Russian anti-gay campaign, which associates European and American power with the hidden hand of the gay international, was targeted to the Muslim world as well as to domestic constituencies. These.”

— Timothy Snyder

269. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

271. “Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It.”

— Timothy Snyder

272. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

274. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

276. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

278. “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

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

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

— Timothy Snyder

282. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

284. “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

285. “The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. A.”

— Timothy Snyder

286. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

288. “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. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular – and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.”

— Timothy Snyder

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

294. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

300. “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