Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

327. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

331. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

338. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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