On Tyranny Quotes

“It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant. During”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy. The Russian recap of the first telephone call between the president and Vladimir Putin is telling: The two men “shared the opinion that it is necessary to join forces against the common enemy number one: international terrorism and extremism.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The authoritarians of today are also terror managers, and if anything they are rather more creative. Consider the current Russian regime, so admired by the president. Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire, he then used a series of terror attacks—real, questionable, and fake—to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one great, bloody accident.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan “America First.” It”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. This sort of work can be done at the local and state levels. We can be sure that the elections of 2018, assuming they take place, will be a test of American traditions. So there is much to do in the meantime. 4 Take responsibility for the face of the world. The”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation. Fascists ruled for a decade or two, leaving behind an intact intellectual legacy that grows more relevant by the day. Communists ruled for longer, for nearly seven decades in the Soviet Union, and more than four decades in much of eastern Europe. They proposed rule by a disciplined party elite with a monopoly on reason that would guide society toward a certain future according to supposedly fixed laws of history. We”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“What does it mean that six of the president’s companies have gone bankrupt, and that the president’s enterprises have been financed by mysterious infusions of cash from entities in Russia and Kazakhstan?”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Extremism certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word terrorism in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). Christians”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people. European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“generations have laid before them. One thing is certain: If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century