On Tyranny Quotes

“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

“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. Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent.”
― 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

“The path of least resistance leads directly from inevitability to eternity. If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.”
― 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".”
― 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

“An American president used the slogan “America First,” which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Steve Bannon promised policies that would be “as exciting as the 1930s.” When exactly was the “again” in the slogan “Make America great again”? It is, sadly, the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”
― 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

“More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies,”
― 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

“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

“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

“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. 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

“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

“The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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

“As they knew, 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

“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

“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

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

“Milgram grasped that 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. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. It”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Be as courageous as you can. 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

“In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Ionesco’s aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Before you deride the “mainstream media,” note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult.”
― 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