Quotes from Anne Applebaum

Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal. Kalyvas is, among other things, the

If they [the Russians] Ã¢â'¬Â¦ take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don't answer deeper questions about national or personal identity. They don't satisfy the desire for unity and harmony. Above all, they do not satisfy the desire of some to belong to a special community, a unique community, a superior community.

Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running. Tragically

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

J'accuse," published in 1898, Emile Zola

satirist Caran d'Ache

Las plazas universitarias, los puestos relacionados con los derechos civiles o los cargos de responsabilidad en el Gobierno y la industria no se asignaban a los más trabajadores ni a los más capaces, sino a los más leales.

I am not sure when it became de rigueur for presidential candidates to publish a work between hard covers, but nobody now runs for high office without having written, or having arranged for the ghostwriting of, a very large book.

One of the reasons why many British voters chose to leave the European Union was because they distrusted European institutions. Of all the many costs of Brexit, this was one I did not foresee: That it could wind up damaging the nation's faith in its own institutions too.

Clearly, the qualities Poles admire in a secretary of state - foreign languages, diplomatic experience, even sense of humor - are emphatically not those desired in a head of state: So be it.

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.

Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically "left-wing" or "right-wing" about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.

The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out 'reforms,' even when they personally had nothing to do with the past crimes.

If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state's gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.

Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies.

It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.

Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others—Mao's China, for example—qualified too.

This book was not written 'so that it will not happen again', as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people.

We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.