Quotes from Anne Applebaum

Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative.

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

Just shouting about 'facts' will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce them.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one's nation, of one's ideology, of one's morality, of one's values.

If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.

In the United States, the world's most important democracy, Congress seems permanently deadlocked, in hock to moneyed interests, unable to grapple with the big issues of climate change, technological change, the information revolution.

Inside the noisy and chaotic modern information sphere, the message doesn't matter nearly as much as the messenger.

Nationalism has nothing to do with democratic values: Authoritarians can be nationalists; indeed, most are.

Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.

The hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some political or commercial use.

In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade.

Clearly, the inhabitants of stable democracies find it hard to appreciate what they have: 'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone' isn't just a song lyric; it's an expression of something fundamental about the human brain.

Everywhere he goes, Trump is bored by working meetings and rude to those who attend them. He can't make deals or negotiate because he doesn't know enough about the issues.

European leaders have learned that there is no point in seeking agreement with Trump, for he doesn't respect those who do.

We don't live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union's; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.

All nations are imagined communities, and our imagined community is based on a uniquely inspiring set of principles. Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil.

Profound political shifts - events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances - do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

Many people no longer trust major media outlets to give them valuable information - and they may never do so again.

The evolution of a bourgeoisie is a healthy phenomenon when it grows and prospers thanks to bourgeois values: hard work, honesty, personal responsibility.

One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies.