Top 380 Timothy Snyder Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

354. “The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.”

— Timothy Snyder

355. “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

356. “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

357. “The ashes of Warsaw were still warm when the Cold War began.”

— Timothy Snyder

358. “In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

360. “Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible.”

— Timothy Snyder

361. “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

362. “But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?”

— Timothy Snyder

363. “It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

365. “Hitler foresaw a “resolution of the Polish problem” by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human.”

— Timothy Snyder

366. “Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.”

— Timothy Snyder

367. “Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future. That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.”

— Timothy Snyder

368. “Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.”

— Timothy Snyder

369. “The absence of freedom threatens life, just as threats to life undermine freedom.”

— Timothy Snyder

370. “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

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

— Timothy Snyder

372. “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

373. “Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.”

— Timothy Snyder

374. “In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree.”

— Timothy Snyder

375. “In the 1990s, Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York City to allow anonymous purchases of apartment units, an opportunity that the Russian mob quickly exploited.”

— Timothy Snyder

376. “No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past.”

— Timothy Snyder

377. “When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary.”

— Timothy Snyder

378. “Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn. The.”

— Timothy Snyder

379. “People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.”

— Timothy Snyder

380. “Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible.”

— Timothy Snyder

381. “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

382. “We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.”

— Timothy Snyder

383. “Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere – education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations – Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.”

— Timothy Snyder

384. “When we are very young, we all need someone else’s goodwill if we are to learn to stand at all. Because we live in time in a certain direction, we cannot make up later for what we were not given earlier.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

386. “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

387. “In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values.”

— Timothy Snyder

388. “But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant.”

— Timothy Snyder

389. “We talked about how, over time, beginning in youth, an accumulation of decisions makes us who we are. Then a moment comes when we do what we must because of what we have chosen to become. An unfree person can always try to run. But sometimes a free person has to stay. Free will is character.”

— Timothy Snyder

390. “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

391. “The word “Auschwitz” has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.”

— Timothy Snyder

392. “Contribute to good causes.”

— Timothy Snyder

393. “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

394. “Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.”

— Timothy Snyder

395. “We cannot be neutral: we either deaden the world around us, or we make it more lively.”

— Timothy Snyder