Timothy Snyder quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Timothy Snyder on Wise Famous Quotes.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics.

When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary.

Listen for dangerous words.

Make sure you and your family have passports.

The good people died first.

It is the government's job to increase both freedom and security.

Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization.

The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

salami tactics - slicing off layers of opposition one by one.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. You

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.

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.

the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded. Certainly

Practice corporeal politics.

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

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.

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.

The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been

The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics.

All in all, the purification of the armed forces, state institutions, and the communist party led to about fifty thousand executions.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

It was easier to triumph in violence that it was to make a new order.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible.

A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.

Be wary of paramilitaries.

to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

Be reflective if you must be armed.

Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.

These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena.

But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It

But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant.

Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.

Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If

defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future.

A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.

This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. -

all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.

States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated.

Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy.

Beijing's preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself.

The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality. -

The predominant view was that budgets should be balanced and money supplies tightened. This, as we know today, only made matters worse.

If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If

The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.

fringe groups representing national minorities who could imagine that somehow the destruction of states provided opportunities.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny

The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos. -

people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. Protest

Make eye contact and small talk.

Learn from peers in other countries.

Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan "America First." It

Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.

You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The

the view of many reasonable people in 1933, just as it is the view of many reasonable people now.

Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country's history, which (thus far) it has been.

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.

Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.