Words matter. These are the best Timothy D. Snyder Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Every day you don’t do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you’ve got to get started right away.
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.
Trump’s Twitter flood of late-night mendacity is an unhindered celebration of fragile manhood, a ceaseless summons to the millions for affirmation, a proclamation to vulnerable men across the land that endless preening and stroking is a normal and imitable way of life.
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.
I thought I was going to grow up and become a diplomat and negotiate nuclear arms.
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.
Courage does not mean not fearing or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.
I think, whatever ideological coloration we think actually applies to Trump, we can be pretty confident that he sees the American state as a mechanism to make sure that people called Trump are rich forever.
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.
It is aspiring tyrants who say that ‘civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.’ Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.
Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
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.
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.
It’s easy for us to congratulate ourselves on our own moral superiority when compared to the 1930s, but I’m not sure that we’re actually right about that. In most of the West, we simply haven’t been tested in the same way. And when we are tested, we often fail.
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.
It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.
In rhetoric and action, the Trump administration has aggrandized ‘radical Islamic terror,’ thus making what Madison called a ‘favorable emergency’ more likely.
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.
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.
Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.
Trump bankrupted six companies but succeeded on the biggest of stages. He is the champion of failures.
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.
When a terrorist attack comes, you will not necessarily know who did it. What you can know is that certain kinds of leaders will use that to suspend your rights.
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.
The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law – that form of government is usually temporary.
If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn’t be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you’re trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.
Very often, when leaders repeat things over and over, they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality.
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.
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.
Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall.
Modern tyrants are terror managers. Do not allow your shock to be turned against your freedom.
Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
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.
The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree.
Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.
