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
We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and
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In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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
No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
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.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
This should give us pause. History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west. Everything that happens here seems to happen there first.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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.