“ Believe in truth. 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.… Timothy Snyder
“ Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the successio… Timothy Snyder
“ In the politics of the every day, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. Timothy Snyder
“ Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947)… Timothy Snyder
“ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here is perhaps not a great work of art;… Timothy Snyder
“ The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); The Pow… Timothy Snyder
“ Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat.… Timothy Snyder
“ Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden d… Timothy Snyder
“ Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat… Timothy Snyder
“ How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic… Timothy Snyder
“ ...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew pass… Timothy Snyder
“ It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator o… Timothy Snyder
“ The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in t… Timothy Snyder
“ The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured o… Timothy Snyder
“ History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have. Timothy Snyder
“ Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible. Timothy Snyder
“ The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. Timothy Snyder
“ Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free an… Timothy Snyder
“ Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches fo… Timothy Snyder
