Quotes from Timothy Snyder

What does it mean that six of the president's companies have gone bankrupt, and that the president's enterprises have been financed by mysterious infusions of cash from entities in Russia and Kazakhstan?

All citizens do have a measure of control, at least in democracies where their votes are counted, of how they belong to their nations. Perhaps they will have more confidence in unconventional choices if they see that each nation's founders were disobedient and unpredictable, men and women of imagination and ambition. The steel of every national monument was once molten.

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons and internment camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.

When exactly was the 'again' in the president's slogan 'Make America great again'? Hint: It is the same 'again' that we find in 'Never again.

The nation faces forward. It is made and remade every day. If we believe that the nation resides in the orderly recitations of history given to us by our leaders, then our story is over

salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched.

Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism.

Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization.

The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow.

support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.

The seduction by a mythicized pas prevents us from thinking about possible futures

You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent.

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.

History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: "I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive." She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle.

to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. other forces were at work besides conformism. But without conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.

For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. 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. James