Quotes About Power

Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

It took less than a year for the new Nazi order to consolidate. By the end of 1933, Germany had become a one-party state in which all major institutions had been humbled

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We

A party emboldened by a favorable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within.

When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.

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

The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law. Because

The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. A

We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.

where annual elections end, tyranny begins.

how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it.

A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take. But those who followed the symbolic logic became victims in their turn. Having turned the poorer peasants against the richer, Soviet power then seized everyone's land for the new collective farms.

As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: "Any of the comrades who can't see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we'll have to feed."4

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

Be wary of paramilitaries.

Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler's opponents during his rallies. As

Timothy Snyder

They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.

Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.

The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

The Great Terror took place during a state of exception that required all policemen to subordinate themselves to the NKVD and its special tasks.

The Russian anti-gay campaign, which associates European and American power with the hidden hand of the gay international, was targeted to the Muslim world as well as to domestic constituencies. These

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.