Quotes from Timothy Snyder

The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler's time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places were the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection.

A planetary vision of bloody racial struggle, something not inherently attractive to most people most of the time, was translated at moments of stress into concepts and images that could generate political support.

Brezhnev. It was Brezhnev who proved to be Stalin's most important successor, because he redefined the Soviet attitude to time: he buried the Marxist politics of inevitability, and replaced it with a Soviet politics of eternity.

Auschwitz was unusual, however, in one important respect. Unlike the death pits in the doubly occupied zone and the occupied Soviet Union, unlike the death facilities at Be??ec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Che?mno, it was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign.

Czechoslovakia spoke of "normalization," which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal. To say otherwise in Brezhnev's Soviet Union was to be condemned to an insane asylum.

The key to this translation of ideology to politics in both cases was an effective appeal to human experience at the crucial time.

To find his successor, Yeltsin's entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.

The psychological and political reasons to overcompensate by insisting on victimhood were strong.

The ashes of Warsaw were still warm when the Cold War began.

The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans began to separate the Jews not into two but into three groups: the men, the older women, and the young women. They sent the young women into the gas last, because they liked to look at their naked bodies in the cold. By then the corpses were burned rather than buried. The pyres were huge grills made from railway rails laid upon concrete pillars, some thirty meters across. By spring 1943, fires

The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos. —

The Commonwealth attained its greatest glory when its Polish and Lithuanian knights and its Ukrainian Cossacks fought side by side.

The last Lithuanian grand duke who even knew the Lithuanian language died the year Columbus discovered America.

Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had taken place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had somehow deserved to be invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia soon exploited within the European Union and the United States.

The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity of prewar citizenship. These structures created the matrix within which individual choices were made, the constraints upon those who did evil, and the possibilities for those who wished to do good.

The painter's Volhynia Experiment can be seen as an attempt to hold back the tide of time, to preserve the native Ukrainian-Polish-Jewish social order, while tolerating emerging modern national differences. It can also be understood as a kind of alternative modernity, a multiculturalism avant la lettre,in which state policies were designed not to build a single nation, but rather to accommodate the inevitable differences among several.

Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

Most nations' constitutions enshrine a right to health care. The list includes Japan and Germany, whose new constitutions the United States influenced after defeating them in the Second World War. Today Germans and Japanese live longer and healthier lives than Americans.

Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.

A] history of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconceived.

Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war. —