174 Quotes by Timothy Snyder

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.

The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps. The.

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.

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

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual – and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.

Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.

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.

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.