Quotes from Timothy Snyder

Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less.

You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The

It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive relationship or vote for a fascist. Similarly,

To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and fake news. When

It is the government's job to increase both freedom and security.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. 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. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both

When fascists or Nazis or communists did well in elections in the 1930s or '40s, what followed was some combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched. The

Most of the states of Europe had no prospect of social transformation, and thus little ability to rival or counter the Nazis and the Soviets.

Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future.

It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.

Hitler was not a German nationalist, sure of German victory, aiming for an enlarged German state. He was a zoological anarchist who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored. The

Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar

One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

We learned to say that there was "no alternative" to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called "liquid evil.

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. A few extreme (and less extreme) examples from the twentieth century can show us how.

They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.55

The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. —

Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As