Top 350 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

303. “The final mode is misplaced faith.”

— Timothy Snyder

304. “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

305. “We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero invetsment? We get what we pay for.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

320. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

322. “Make eye contact and small talk.”

— Timothy Snyder

323. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

325. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

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

— Timothy Snyder

330. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

332. “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

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

— 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. “The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow.”

— Timothy Snyder

336. “Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for.”

— Timothy Snyder

337. “Contribute to good causes.”

— Timothy Snyder

338. “Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.”

— Timothy Snyder

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

343. “What does it mean that six of the president’s companies have gone bankrupt, and that the president’s enterprises have been financed by mysterious infusions of cash from entities in Russia and Kazakhstan?”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

345. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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