Top 100 Timothy Snyder Quotes
#1. Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.
Timothy Snyder
#2. same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism
Timothy Snyder
#3. The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler's time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.
Timothy Snyder
#4. But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant.
Timothy Snyder
#5. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.
Timothy Snyder
#6. Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If
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#7. You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The
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#8. A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.
Timothy Snyder
#9. In his 2016 campaign, the American president used the slogan "America First," which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany.
Timothy Snyder
#10. The word "Auschwitz" has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.
Timothy Snyder
#11. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.
Timothy Snyder
#12. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.
Timothy Snyder
#13. The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization's edge would test the manhood of coming generations of German settlers.
Timothy Snyder
#14. Like Hitler, the president used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking, and presented journalism as a campaign against himself. The president was on friendlier terms with the internet, his source for erroneous information that he passed on to millions of people. In
Timothy Snyder
#15. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.
Timothy Snyder
#17. The German communist party, for years the strongest outside the Soviet Union itself, was broken in a matter of a few months. Its defeat was a serious blow to the prestige of the international communist movement.11
Timothy Snyder
#18. The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability. A
Timothy Snyder
#19. 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
#20. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If
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#21. In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.
Timothy Snyder
#22. It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen were to fulfill their mission as "ideological soldiers" by eliminating the educated classes of a defeated enemy. (They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.)
Timothy Snyder
#23. defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future.
Timothy Snyder
#24. We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for.
Timothy Snyder
#25. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.
Timothy Snyder
#26. fringe groups representing national minorities who could imagine that somehow the destruction of states provided opportunities.
Timothy Snyder
#28. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. 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 or a bystander.
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#29. The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.
Timothy Snyder
#30. no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered.
Timothy Snyder
#31. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.
Timothy Snyder
#32. Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.
Timothy Snyder
#33. The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos. -
Timothy Snyder
#34. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary.
Timothy Snyder
#35. Beijing's preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself.
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#36. Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz The poor child cries as alone he goes There's no bread and there's no fat The party's ended all of that Seek not the gentle nor the mild A father's eaten his own child The party man he beats and stamps And sends us to Siberian camps38
Timothy Snyder
#37. Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization.
Timothy Snyder
#38. 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. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
Timothy Snyder
#39. If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one great, bloody accident.
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#40. A planetary vision of bloody racial struggle, something not inherently attractive to most people most of the time, was translated at moments of stress into concepts and images that could generate political support.
Timothy Snyder
#41. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been
Timothy Snyder
#42. a man can be human only under human conditions." The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal.
Timothy Snyder
#43. This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.
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#44. One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking "for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk."75
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#45. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.
Timothy Snyder
#46. No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past.
Timothy Snyder
#47. Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler's opponents during his rallies. As
Timothy Snyder
#48. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.
Timothy Snyder
#49. 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 their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both
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#50. Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In
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#51. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie," wrote Havel, "then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth." Since
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#53. Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.
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#55. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As
Timothy Snyder
#56. The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions - even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.
Timothy Snyder
#57. If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.
Timothy Snyder
#58. 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
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#60. All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions.
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#61. When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.
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#62. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency. What
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#63. It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive relationship or vote for a fascist. Similarly,
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#65. Hitler had used an act of terror, an event of limited inherent significance, to institute a regime of terror that killed millions of people and changed the world. The
Timothy Snyder
#66. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible.
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#68. The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1
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#69. No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressor, the Germans always the victims.
Timothy Snyder
#70. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.
Timothy Snyder
#71. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible.
Timothy Snyder
#72. Most of the states of Europe had no prospect of social transformation, and thus little ability to rival or counter the Nazis and the Soviets.
Timothy Snyder
#73. The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.
Timothy Snyder
#74. In 1942, propaganda against Slavs would ease, as more of them came to work in the Reich. Hitler's decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labor) was presumably facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (rather than kill them).
Timothy Snyder
#75. A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.
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#76. This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. -
Timothy Snyder
#78. By July 1933 it was illegal in Germany to belong to any other political party than the Nazis. In November the Nazis staged a parliamentary election in which
Timothy Snyder
#79. No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.
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#80. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world. -
Timothy Snyder
#82. The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality. -
Timothy Snyder
#83. One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.
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#84. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It
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#85. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In
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#86. Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan "America First." It
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#87. These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena.
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#88. It was easier to triumph in violence that it was to make a new order.
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#89. the view of many reasonable people in 1933, just as it is the view of many reasonable people now.
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#90. Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: "If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot." Even
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#91. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The
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#92. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.
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#93. Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30
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#94. Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy.
Timothy Snyder
#95. Who," asked Hitler, "remembers the Red Indians?" For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.
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#96. people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. Protest
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#97. to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.
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#98. If past and future contained nothing but struggle and scarcity, all attention fell upon the present. A psychic resolve for relief from a sense of crisis overwhelmed the practical resolve to think about the future. Rather
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#99. States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated.
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#100. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny
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