Timothy Snyder

“Rather than reporting the violation of basic rights, our media generally preferred to mindlessly indulge the inherently salacious interest we have in…

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

“It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive…

— Timothy Snyder

“The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

“the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some…

— Timothy Snyder

“We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are…

— Timothy Snyder

“It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to…

— Timothy Snyder

“In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. Communists required all…

— Timothy Snyder

“Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one…

— Timothy Snyder

“By 1940 most Europeans had made their peace with the seemingly irresistible power of Nazi Germany. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh…

— Timothy Snyder

“Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much…

— Timothy Snyder

“having a passport is not a sign of surrender. On the contrary, it is liberating, since it creates the possibility of new…

— Timothy Snyder

“On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves…

— Timothy Snyder

“Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our…

— Timothy Snyder

“Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense…

— Timothy Snyder

“If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in…

— Timothy Snyder

“The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So long as there was a contest between communist and capitalist systems, and…

— Timothy Snyder

“The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way…

— Timothy Snyder

“Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism…

— Timothy Snyder

“Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany of the 1930s, of the Soviet Union during the…

— Timothy Snyder

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be…

— Timothy Snyder

“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The…

— Timothy Snyder

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

— Timothy Snyder

“Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”

— Timothy Snyder

“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.”

— Timothy Snyder

“These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena.”

— Timothy Snyder

“all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised.”

— Timothy Snyder

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

— Timothy Snyder

“In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling…

— Timothy Snyder

“Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.”

— Timothy Snyder

“The predominant view was that budgets should be balanced and money supplies tightened. This, as we know today, only made matters worse.”

— Timothy Snyder

“In the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, NKVD officers recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them…

— Timothy Snyder

“The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise,…

— Timothy Snyder

“Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream. Lithuanians”

— Timothy Snyder

“defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future.”

— Timothy Snyder

“When states are absent, rights—by any definition—are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded,…

— Timothy Snyder

“As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.”

— Timothy Snyder

“you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves…

— Timothy Snyder