Quotes from Timothy Snyder

Beijing's preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself.

The content of various political ideas was beside the point, since all were merely traps for fools. There were no Jewish liberals and no Jewish nationalists, no Jewish messiahs and no Jewish Bolsheviks: "Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew." Hitler saw Jesus as an enemy of Jews whose teachings had been perverted by Paul to become one more false Jewish universalism, that of mercy to the weak.

European Union and the United States were presented as threats because Russian elections were faked. In winter 2011 and spring 2012, Russian television channels and newspapers generated the narrative that all who protested electoral fraud were paid by Western institutions.

Hitler foresaw a "resolution of the Polish problem" by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human.

In the 1990s, Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York City to allow anonymous purchases of apartment units, an opportunity that the Russian mob quickly exploited.

Law had no purpose beyond the codification of a Führer's momentary intuitions about the good of his race.

there is nothing, in fact, which man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain." Herling became convinced "that a man can only be human under human conditions." From

statehood was crucial to future national existence.

What the glorious retellings of the history of Irgun and Lehi often omit is the Polish connection.

Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the East.

changes. It was the deliberate policy of Nazi Germany to artificially create conditions of state destruction and then steer the consequences towards Jews.

Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream. Lithuanians

fringe groups representing national minorities who could imagine that somehow the destruction of states provided opportunities.

For the reporters, the heroes of our time

Communication among citizens depends upon equality. At the same time, equality cannot be achieved without facts.

certain kinds of polities, communist party-states such as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are capable, in times of peace, of killing large numbers of their own citizens as a matter of deliberate policy.

When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary.

On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state.

Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.

Putin's aim was not to fool Ukrainians but to create a bond of willing ignorance with Russians, who were meant to understand that Putin was lying but to believe him a

The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin p

some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics.

Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible.

Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters.