On Tyranny Quotes

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

“to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“بیشتر قدرتی که در اختیار اقتدارگرایی قرار میگیرد، داوطلبانه به آن داده شده است، پس در اطاعت پیش دستی نکنید.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The Great Terror took place during a state of exception that required all policemen to subordinate themselves to the NKVD and its special tasks.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937–38 and the Holocaust of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany in 1941–45. Yet we make a great mistake if we imagine that the Soviet NKVD or the Nazi SS acted without support. Without the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“What was novel in 2016 was a candidate who ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies and 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

“Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals.”
― 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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take. But those who followed the symbolic logic became victims in their turn. Having turned the poorer peasants against the richer, Soviet power then seized everyone’s land for the new collective farms.”
― 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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“where annual elections end, tyranny begins.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“A party emboldened by a favorable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

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

“At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress.”
― 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. 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

“history has seen three major democratic moments: after the First World War in 1918, after the Second World War in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here is perhaps not a great work of art; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is better. One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again. 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).”
― 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 and internment camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989–91, we imbibed the myth of an “end of history.” In doing so, we lowered our defenses, 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

“Those who advocated Brexit, the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, imagined a British nation-state, though such a thing never existed. There was a British Empire, and then there was Britain as a member of the European Union. The move to separate from the EU is not a step backward onto firm ground, but a leap into the unknown.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Adolf Hitler had no special animus toward Britain or its empire, and indeed imagined a division of the world into spheres of interests. He expected Churchill to come to terms after the fall of France. Churchill did not. He told the French that "whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“When we learn them from a screen, however, we tend to be drawn in by the logic of spectacle. When we learn of one scandal, it whets our appetite for the next.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“在你嘲笑「主流媒體」之前，請留意它們如今已不再是「主流」了。現今嘲笑媒體才是又主流又簡單的事，而實際的新聞工作卻是步調緊繃、百般困難的。”
― Timothy Snyder, 暴政：掌控關鍵年代的獨裁風潮，洞悉時代之惡的20堂課

“In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two. In 2020 he told on average about twenty-seven lies a day.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century