“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” Thus Hamlet. Yet he concludes:… — 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… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t… — 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
“Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The seduction by a mythicized pas prevents us from thinking about possible futures” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“A planetary vision of bloody racial struggle, something not inherently attractive to most people most of the time, was translated at moments… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos. —” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“In the most dangerous of times, those who escape and survive generally know people whom they can trust. Having old friends is… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his… — 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
