“Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This… — 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 president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions--even when that… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not… — 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