Timothy Snyder Quotes

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. 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 a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.

Be reflective if you must be armed.

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

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. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation.

In politics, being deceived is no excuse. — LESZEK KOŁAKOWSKI

Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream — as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

Our second basic founding document, the Constitution, is basically a design how to prevent someone becoming a tyrant. It assumes that if we have three parts of the government they will balance each other, but what we saw unfold in the impeachment trial was the opposite. The Congress gave way, and then Justice Roberts also gave way. So that at the end... we have a much, much stronger executive claiming nearly absolute power, which is something that the Founders were precisely trying to prevent.

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.

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn’t noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians – civilians and prisoners of war, not soldiers on active duty! – were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time... We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.

People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.