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" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

Fashion

People

Criticism

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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom. "

" One thing that I would like to get across is that even the most horrible events do have explanations that we can understand. And it's not always comfortable for us to understand, because in order to understand, we have to see how we're not so far away from the people in question. "

" When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of 'terrorism' and 'extremism.' Be alive to the fatal notions of 'exception' and 'emergency.' Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary. "

" It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television. "

" 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. "

" We can only see as much and we can only go as far as our languages take us. "

Timothy D. Snyder

See

Take

" 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. "

" Courage does not mean not fearing or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. "

" What we ended up with, from Bill Clinton onward, is a status quo party and an 'undo the system' party, where the Democrats became the status quo party and the Republicans became the 'undo the system' party. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. "

" To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" It is aspiring tyrants who say that 'civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.' Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse. "

" Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions and emotions and myths. "

" For the Russians, the displacement of the Holocaust is calculated and cynical. It's not emotional; they don't care about the Holocaust one way or another. They only care about it insofar as they can use it to manipulate a German sense of guilt. "

" 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. "

" 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