Quotes from Timothy Snyder

A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.

We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Our own tradition demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. We 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.

The predominant view was that budgets should be balanced and money supplies tightened. This, as we know today, only made matters worse.

When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.

Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of "eternal vigilance" would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.

Hitler and Stalin both accepted a late-nineteenth-century Darwinistic modification: progress was possible, but only as a result of violent struggle between races or classes.

Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For

Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.

Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side. We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government.

It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one's own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one's own companies.

Our time is certainly out of joint. We have forgotten history for one reason and, if we are not careful, we will neglect it for another. We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty.

It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It

the early Americans who spoke of "eternal vigilance" would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection

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 Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises "on some favorable emergency.

Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.

Germany then remained in a state of emergency for the next twelve years, until the end of the Second World War. Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world.

We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call "post-truth," and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern.

Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. T

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

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

generations have laid before them. One thing is certain: If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And

When we learn them from a screen, however, we tend to be drawn in by the logic of spectacle. When we learn of one scandal, it whets our appetite for the next.