On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

In the most dangerous of times, those who escape and survive generally know people whom they can trust.

Today’s authoritarians (in India, Turkey, Russia) are also highly allergic to the idea of free associations and non-governmental organizations.

The fact that most Americans do not have passports has become a problem for American democracy.

Sometimes Americans say that they do not need travel documents, because they prefer to die defending freedom in America. These are fine words, but they miss an important point. The fight will be a long one. Even if it does require sacrifice, it first demands sustained attention to the world around us, so that we know what we are resisting, and how best to do so. So having a passport is not a sign of surrender.

The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception.

Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.”