Anne Applebaum Quotes

#1. 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.

Anne Applebaum

#2. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.

Anne Applebaum

#3. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And

Anne Applebaum

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

Anne Applebaum

#5. the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky wrote that "absolute power is a structure, not a possession.

Anne Applebaum

#6. They didn't just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it."81

Anne Applebaum

#7. it is true that both the Red Army and the secret police traditionally gave vodka to soldiers who were being asked to do dirty work: empty bottles are almost always found inside mass graves.

Anne Applebaum

#8. Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots,

Anne Applebaum