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" It is unclear how much money Trump has, but it is not enough to matter in Russia. If he keeps up his pose as the tough billionaire, he will be flattered by the Russian media, scorned by those who matter in Russia, and then easily crushed by men far richer and smarter than he. "

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" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

Work

Children

American Dream

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

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

" 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. "

" We think about democracy, and that's the word that Americans love to use, 'democracy,' and that's how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it's pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's easy for us to congratulate ourselves on our own moral superiority when compared to the 1930s, but I'm not sure that we're actually right about that. In most of the West, we simply haven't been tested in the same way. And when we are tested, we often fail. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Timothy D. Snyder

Six

Stages

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I worry about global anti-Semitism - not just as a bad idea that originates from bad people, but also as something that arises as a challenge to global order. "