Top 15 Anne Applebaum Quotes

Instead of fighting ideological battles, [Keir] Starmer wanted the party to talk about ordinary people's problems—advice that Democrats in the United States, and centrists around the world, could also stand to hear.

So, yes, this is another mysterious death, but it is a new kind of mysterious death. With this plane crash, the violence on the periphery of Russia’s empire has now migrated to its very heart. Putin's rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence. In the aftermath of Prigozhin's rebellion, Putin needs something more spectacular: theatrical, public violence; violence of the kind that brings down a plane soon after takeoff in the middle of a sunny day; violence designed to terrify anyone who secretly wished for Prigozhin’s victory.

Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin's Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous "firehose of falsehoods"— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don't know what's true, after all, then there isn't anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.

I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it [Hunter Biden's laptop] to be interesting. (April 6, 2022)

The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.

Trump's fawning attitude towards dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame—to rub off on him and enhance his own image.

More important, he [Trump] has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had "total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. ... Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals "a bunch of dopes and babies," and America's intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the "deep state" and whose advice he has ignored.

The American intellectuals who now find themselves alienated from the country that they inhabit aren't interested in reality. They are interested in a fantasy nation, different and distinct from their own hateful country. America, with its complicated social and political as well as ethnic diversity, with its Constitution that ensures we will never, ever all be forced to feel as if "all life is focused in a central purpose"—this America no longer appeals to them at all.
Most of them know that this fantasy foreign nation they admire seeks to put an end to all of that. It seeks to undermine American democracy, beat back American influence, and curtail American power. But to those who dislike American democracy, despair of American influence, and are angered by American power? That, truly, is the point.

Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

That moment has passed. Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year's Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide,

[Guests at a party held by Applebaum and her husband Radosław Sikorski on December 31, 1999 in their Polish home] You could have lumped the majority of them, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right—the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment in history, you might also have called most of my guests liberals—free-market liberals, or classical liberals—or maybe Thatcherites. Even those who might have been less definite about economics certainly believed in democracy, in the rule of law, and in a Poland that was a member of nato and on its way to joining the European Union—an integrated part of modern Europe. In the 1990s, that was what being "on the right" meant.