On Tyranny Quotes

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

“If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning), and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel). Politicians”
― 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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“A nationalist...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.”
― timothy snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the myth of an "end of history". In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Stand out.

Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When exactly was the “again” in the president’s slogan “Make America great again”? Hint: It is the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“If the main pillar of the system is living a lie,” wrote Havel, “then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”
― 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. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.”
― 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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. 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. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. 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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony. Other critics spoke of the need for disruption, borrowing a term from the analysis of technological innovations. When applied to politics, it again carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulating system. The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. —”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders.” If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century