“The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die.… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Father Stalin, look at this Collective farming is just bliss The hut’s in ruins, the barn’s all sagged All the horses broken… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” Thus Hamlet. Yet he concludes: “Nay, come,… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The key to this translation of ideology to politics in both cases was an effective appeal to human experience at the crucial time.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
