Top 380 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one.”

— Timothy Snyder

252. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

255. “Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Practice corporeal politics.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

268. “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

269. “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

270. “The final mode is misplaced faith.”

— Timothy Snyder

271. “A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well – and wishing that it would do better. Democracy.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

273. “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

274. “The second mode is shamanistic incantation.”

— Timothy Snyder

275. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

284. “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

285. “As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

295. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

298. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder