Quotes from Timothy Snyder

Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.

It was an American and not a Russian innovation to present the news as national entertainment, which made the news vulnerable to an entertainer. Trump got his chance in the second half of 2015 because American television networks were pleased with the spectacle he provided. The chief executive officer of a television network said that the Trump campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.

In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.

In the politics of the every day, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.

Hyperpartisan stories on Fox News or outbursts on Breitbart gained viewership thanks to retransmission by Russian bots. Russian support helped fringe right-wing sites such as Next News Network gain notoriety and influence. Its videos were viewed about 56 million times in October 2016.

For many Europeans and Americans, events in the 2010s—the rise of antidemocratic politics, the Russian turn against Europe and invasion of Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election—came as a surprise.

Every Pennsylvania county that Obama won in 2012 but Trump won in 2016 was in opioid crisis.

Part of Stalin's political talent was his ability to equate foreign threats with failures in domestic policy, as if the two were actually the same thing, and as if he were responsible for neither.

Adolf Hitler claimed that all that mattered was the struggle of the race, and that the elimination of Jews would restore nature's eternal balance. His Thousand-Year Reich lasted twelve years, and he committed suicide. A state does not endure because a leader mystifies a generation.

When history is removed, numbers go upward and memories go inward, to all of our peril.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

When there is no one with time to talk, no chance to find another approach, then we come to feel that we have to choose between pain and pills. [...] When painkillers work, that creates a particular danger, because then we can ignore the deeper sources of suffering. [...] Suffering and self medicating are both lonely activities; they feel like free choices, but they create an imbalance that leaves us in bondage.