Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States — fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given… - Timothy Snyder

What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.

When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.

The whole idea of the Declaration of Independence is that no man is above the law. ...King George was breaking established rules, established contracts. ...Mr. Trump's defense in the impeachment trial was precisely that he is above the law; that whatever he says is the law; that we should wait and see what he says, and then adapt the law to that. That is precisely what tyrants over the centuries, and authoritarians in the last century have always said.