On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation.

people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.

Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.

You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.

Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.

Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything.

A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.