Quotes from Timothy Snyder

how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it.

It is gratifying to know that, whatever the course of events, you are helping others to do good. Many of us can afford to support some part of the vast network of charities that one of our former presidents called "a thousand points of light." Those points of light are best seen, like stars at dusk, against a darkening sky.

It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.

All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen. Many of them had no special preparation for this task. They found themselves in an unknown land, they had their orders, and they did not want to look weak. In the rare cases when they refused these orders to murder Jews, policemen were not punished.

The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence.

A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take. But those who followed the symbolic logic became victims in their turn. Having turned the poorer peasants against the richer, Soviet power then seized everyone's land for the new collective farms.

As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: "Any of the comrades who can't see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we'll have to feed."4

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.

Be wary of paramilitaries.

The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds.

Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler's opponents during his rallies. As

No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressor, the Germans always the victims.

What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As

So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.

If the main pillar of the system is living a lie," wrote Havel, "then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth." Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public's sense of truth.

Teresa now observed that people quietly allowed their Jewish friends to slip away from their lives.

Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals.

Germans carried out what they called the "Great Action," deporting some 265,040 Jews to the death factory at Treblinka to be

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning.

murdered and killing another 10,380 Jews in the ghetto itself. Teresa saved a family from certain death.

The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one.