Quotes from Anne Applebaum

Plato feared the "false and braggart words" of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.

Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them—even if that means a loss of freedom.

Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group—all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people:

This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.

Although the definition of an 'enemy of the state' changed over time, the mechanisms to deal with these enemies were put in place right at the very beginning.

Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat.

Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not—all will walk. Those who can't walk—we will shoot.

When people say they are angry about "immigration," in other words, they are not always talking about something they have lived and experienced. They are talking about something imaginary, something they fear.

in most Western countries, most of the time, there was a single, national debate. Opinions differed, but at least most people were arguing within agreed parameters. That world has vanished.

There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive.

Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue.

Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

As in nature, so in politics: Every action has a reaction.

If we can't have a public debate because the information space is so polluted, or because people are afraid of the reactions of organized trolls, then we can't really have meaningful elections anymore, either.

The idea of social realist art and of Marxist journalism was that: 'We're going to tell people not what things were like, but what they should be like, and what they will be like, and we'll get them to keep focusing on the future.'

Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.

After Trump became president, it was really too late to investigate his dodgy investments in Azerbaijan or his links to Russian money laundering. Those stories should have eliminated him from business, and from public life, long before 2016.

Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.

Even in the best of times, the United States' ability to influence events in faraway places is limited. The tools we have, from soft power and diplomacy to sanctions and bombing campaigns, are never guaranteed to succeed.

The anti-European Tories were a fringe group - until they took over their whole party.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

Many Americans, but Republicans in particular, long opposed the nationalization of industry and state-controlled companies that are more common in Europe. Instead, they were proud of the American commitment to both economic and political freedom.

Alongside the flat-earthers, 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have always had a special distinction: They can do immediate and specific damage in a way that the others can't.