Quotes from Timothy Snyder

If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.

An American president used the slogan "America First," which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Steve Bannon promised policies that would be "as exciting as the 1930s." When exactly was the "again" in the slogan "Make America great again"? It is, sadly, the same "again" that we find in "Never again.

to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.

One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.

After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989–91, we imbibed the myth of an "end of history." In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.

Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark

all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders".

To forbid analogies makes the Holocaust irrelevant to future generations. If an American child can identify with Anne Frank, an American child might ask what it is like for immigrant children to be separated from their parents. To forbid analogies is to forbid learning, and to forbid empathizing. That, sadly, is the point.

Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

nothing is real that does not end on the streets.

Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it.

Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom.

They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.

Do not obey in advance.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

a man can be human only under human conditions." The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal.

having a passport is not a sign of surrender. On the contrary, it is liberating, since it creates the possibility of new experiences. It allows us to see how other people, sometimes wiser than we, react to similar problems. Since so much of what has happened in the last year is familiar to the rest of the world or from recent history, we must observe and listen.

When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.

The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible.

The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1

Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything.