Top 380 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

304. “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

305. “The content of various political ideas was beside the point, since all were merely traps for fools. There were no Jewish liberals and no Jewish nationalists, no Jewish messiahs and no Jewish Bolsheviks: “Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.” Hitler saw Jesus as an enemy of Jews whose teachings had been perverted by Paul to become one more false Jewish universalism, that of mercy to the weak.”

— Timothy Snyder

306. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

308. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

310. “Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals.”

— Timothy Snyder

311. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

314. “To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and fake news. When.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

317. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

321. “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

322. “A party emboldened by a favorable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within.”

— Timothy Snyder

323. “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

324. “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

325. “After the Second World War, Europeans, Americans, and others created myths of righteous resistance to Hitler. In the 1930s, however, the dominant attitudes had been accommodation and admiration. 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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.”

— Timothy Snyder

330. “Lawyers were vastly overrepresented among the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces who carried out the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, Polish elites, communists, the handicapped, and others.”

— Timothy Snyder

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

335. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

337. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “Germans carried out what they called the “Great Action,” deporting some 265,040 Jews to the death factory at Treblinka to be.”

— Timothy Snyder

343. “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

344. “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

345. “Without a sense of what should be, we cannot be clear about how what is could ever change.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

347. “From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity. It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit.”

— Timothy Snyder

348. “Social media make us more predictable than we need to be and so easier to rule.”

— Timothy Snyder

349. “Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places were the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection.”

— Timothy Snyder

350. “All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen. Many of them had no special preparation for this task. They found themselves in an unknown land, they had their orders, and they did not want to look weak. In the rare cases when they refused these orders to murder Jews, policemen were not punished.”

— Timothy Snyder