Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. "

Related Quotes:

" In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you're the Russian media, whether you're Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn't true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this. "

Timothy D. Snyder

Media

Step

First Step

" When a terrorist attack comes, you will not necessarily know who did it. What you can know is that certain kinds of leaders will use that to suspend your rights. "

" Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. "

" I thought I was going to grow up and become a diplomat and negotiate nuclear arms. "

" If it turns out that there are emotions and values that are more numerous and more vibrant than indifference and hatred, things are going to be okay. That depends on us. "

Timothy D. Snyder

Okay

Hatred

" The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary. "

" If we can't have exchanges with our friends and family, with loved ones that won't at some point be made public, then we can't have private lives. And if we can't have private lives, then we're not really free people. "

" In rhetoric and action, the Trump administration has aggrandized 'radical Islamic terror,' thus making what Madison called a 'favorable emergency' more likely. "

" I think, whatever ideological coloration we think actually applies to Trump, we can be pretty confident that he sees the American state as a mechanism to make sure that people called Trump are rich forever. "

" If we don't have access to facts, we can't trust each other. Without trust, there's no law. Without law, there's no democracy. "

" The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote. Our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much. "

" People in the West tend to identify with western victims. So even when they think about the Holocaust, they really think about the German or French victims; they're not thinking about the Polish, Hungarian, or Soviet victims. "

" Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say 'fascism' or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say 'no' because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in. "

" Modern tyrants are terror managers. Do not allow your shock to be turned against your freedom. "

" Trump bankrupted six companies but succeeded on the biggest of stages. He is the champion of failures. "

Timothy D. Snyder

Six

Stages

" Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall. "

" Interestingly, a number of the people I know - probably you do, too - who predicted that Trump would win were precisely Russians and Ukrainians who found the political style familiar and just asked, 'Well, why couldn't it work there?' They were the ones who turned out to be right. "

" People who lived in the 1920s and '30s and '40s were not so different from us. In some ways, they were probably better citizens than we are. They had longer attention spans, for example. Educated people tended to read a bit more than we did. "

" Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history. "

" Every day you don't do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you've got to get started right away. "

" Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all. "

" Mr. Trump is primarily a television personality. As such, he is judged by that standard. This means that a scandal does not call forth a response; it calls forth the desire for a bigger scandal. "

" The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror - real or fake, provoked or accidental - can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy. "

" There's a basic problem with the history of the Holocaust. The people who do it don't know the necessary languages. "

" If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business. "

" The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else. "

" Maybe I am naive, but I don't think talking about the Holocaust with total and complete cynicism is possible for Israeli politicians. It's inevitable that the Holocaust is part of Israeli politics. "

" Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action. "

" Americans can accept that the American Dream will not work out for them; what has been heartbreaking for so many is the sense that their children will have it even worse. "

" Trump's Twitter flood of late-night mendacity is an unhindered celebration of fragile manhood, a ceaseless summons to the millions for affirmation, a proclamation to vulnerable men across the land that endless preening and stroking is a normal and imitable way of life. "