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

Timothy D. Snyder

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

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" Very often, when leaders repeat things over and over, they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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

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

Timothy D. Snyder

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

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

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

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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

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

Timothy D. Snyder

Surround Yourself

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

Take For Granted

" Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of 'our institutions' unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

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

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder

" 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. "

Timothy D. Snyder