Quotes from Timothy D. Snyder

Every day you don't do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you've got to get started right away.

When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of 'terrorism' and 'extremism.' Be alive to the fatal notions of 'exception' and 'emergency.' Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

I worry about global anti-Semitism - not just as a bad idea that originates from bad people, but also as something that arises as a challenge to global order.

Democracy only has substance if there's the rule of law. That is, if people believe that the votes are going to be counted, and they are counted. If they believe that there's a judiciary out there that will make sense of things if there's some challenge. If there isn't rule of law, people will be afraid to vote the way they want to vote.

Trump's Twitter flood of late-night mendacity is an unhindered celebration of fragile manhood, a ceaseless summons to the millions for affirmation, a proclamation to vulnerable men across the land that endless preening and stroking is a normal and imitable way of life.

Trump bankrupted six companies but succeeded on the biggest of stages. He is the champion of failures.

If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.

Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.

Interestingly, a number of the people I know - probably you do, too - who predicted that Trump would win were precisely Russians and Ukrainians who found the political style familiar and just asked, 'Well, why couldn't it work there?' They were the ones who turned out to be right.

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary.

The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree.

Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.

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.

When a terrorist attack comes, you will not necessarily know who did it. What you can know is that certain kinds of leaders will use that to suspend your rights.

It's easy for us to congratulate ourselves on our own moral superiority when compared to the 1930s, but I'm not sure that we're actually right about that. In most of the West, we simply haven't been tested in the same way. And when we are tested, we often fail.

If we can't have exchanges with our friends and family, with loved ones that won't at some point be made public, then we can't have private lives. And if we can't have private lives, then we're not really free people.

There's a basic problem with the history of the Holocaust. The people who do it don't know the necessary languages.

One thing that I would like to get across is that even the most horrible events do have explanations that we can understand. And it's not always comfortable for us to understand, because in order to understand, we have to see how we're not so far away from the people in question.

Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say 'fascism' or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say 'no' because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.

In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you're the Russian media, whether you're Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn't true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this.

The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote. Our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.

Americans can accept that the American Dream will not work out for them; what has been heartbreaking for so many is the sense that their children will have it even worse.