On Tyranny Quotes

“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

“The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. It took less than a year for the new Nazi order to consolidate. By the end of 1933, Germany had become a one-party state in which all major institutions had been humbled. That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to confirm the new order. Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Make new friends and march with them. For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“He places the sign in his window so that he can withdraw into daily life without trouble from the authorities. When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe. And indeed some of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the German task forces that perpetrated some of the murders, were tried at Nuremberg and later in West German courts. But even these trials were a kind of minimization of the scale of the crime. Not the SS commanders alone, but essentially all of the thousands of men who served under their command were murderers.”
― 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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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

“Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically. Reality television must become most dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armoury that we have developed somewhere else. 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

“Like Hitler, the President used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking and presented journalism as a campaign against himself.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

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

“Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: The Book to Help You Understand Why Democracy Is Failing In 2025

“People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

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

“If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Remember that email is skywriting.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century