Timothy D. Snyder Quotes

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

I thought I was going to grow up and become a diplomat and negotiate nuclear arms.

We think about democracy, and that’s the word that Americans love to use, ‘democracy,’ and that’s how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it’s pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense.

People who lived in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s were not so different from us. In some ways, they were probably better citizens than we are. They had longer attention spans, for example. Educated people tended to read a bit more than we did.

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

People in the West tend to identify with western victims. So even when they think about the Holocaust, they really think about the German or French victims; they’re not thinking about the Polish, Hungarian, or Soviet victims.

Modern tyrants are terror managers. Do not allow your shock to be turned against your freedom.

For the Russians, the displacement of the Holocaust is calculated and cynical. It’s not emotional; they don’t care about the Holocaust one way or another. They only care about it insofar as they can use it to manipulate a German sense of guilt.

Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say ‘fascism‘ or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say ‘no’ because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.

When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of ‘terrorism‘ and ‘extremism.’ Be alive to the fatal notions of ‘exception‘ and ‘emergency.’ Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else.

Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions and emotions and myths.

Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.

Interestingly, a number of the people I know – probably you do, too – who predicted that Trump would win were precisely Russians and Ukrainians who found the political style familiar and just asked, ‘Well, why couldn’t it work there?’ They were the ones who turned out to be right.

Maybe I am naive, but I don’t think talking about the Holocaust with total and complete cynicism is possible for Israeli politicians. It’s inevitable that the Holocaust is part of Israeli politics.

It is unclear how much money Trump has, but it is not enough to matter in Russia. If he keeps up his pose as the tough billionaire, he will be flattered by the Russian media, scorned by those who matter in Russia, and then easily crushed by men far richer and smarter than he.

Think up your own way of speaking. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.

In rhetoric and action, the Trump administration has aggrandized ‘radical Islamic terror,’ thus making what Madison called a ‘favorable emergency’ more likely.

Trump bankrupted six companies but succeeded on the biggest of stages. He is the champion of failures.

Americans can accept that the American Dream will not work out for them; what has been heartbreaking for so many is the sense that their children will have it even worse.

If we can’t have exchanges with our friends and family, with loved ones that won‘t at some point be made public, then we can’t have private lives. And if we can’t have private lives, then we’re not really free people.

Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.

Mr. Trump is primarily a television personality. As such, he is judged by that standard. This means that a scandal does not call forth a response; it calls forth the desire for a bigger scandal.

Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can’t be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.

Very often, when leaders repeat things over and over, they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality.

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

One thing that I would like to get across is that even the most horrible events do have explanations that we can understand. And it’s not always comfortable for us to understand, because in order to understand, we have to see how we’re not so far away from the people in question.

Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

If it turns out that there are emotions and values that are more numerous and more vibrant than indifference and hatred, things are going to be okay. That depends on us.

We can only see as much and we can only go as far as our languages take us.

What we ended up with, from Bill Clinton onward, is a status quo party and an ‘undo the system’ party, where the Democrats became the status quo party and the Republicans became the ‘undo the system’ party.

Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.

If we don’t have access to facts, we can’t trust each other. Without trust, there’s no law. Without law, there’s no democracy.