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Timothy Snyder QUOTES

181 " It is those who were considered exceptional, eccentric, or even insane in their own time—those who did not change when the world around them did—whom we remember and admire today. "

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

182 " As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. "

― Timothy Snyder , Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

183 " Achamos natural que paguemos por um encanador ou um mecânico, mas procuramos por nossas notícias de graça. Se não pagarmos por encanadores ou mecânicos não esperaremos beber água ou dirigir um carro. Por que, então, deveríamos formar nosso julgamento político com base em zero investimento?"(p. 77) "

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

184 " 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. After the Reichstag fire, Hannah Arendt wrote that “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander. "

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

185 " In 1942, propaganda against Slavs would ease, as more of them came to work in the Reich. Hitler’s decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labor) was presumably facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (rather than kill them). "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

186 " Here, perhaps, is a purpose for history, somewhere between the record of death and its constant reinterpretation. Only a history of mass killing can unite the numbers and the memories. Without history, the memories become private, which today means national; and the numbers become public, which is to say an instrument in the international competition for martyrdom. "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

187 " The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so. "

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

188 " The president is a nationalist, which 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. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better. Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it. "

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

189 " To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

190 " Father Stalin, look at this Collective farming is just bliss The hut’s in ruins, the barn’s all sagged All the horses broken nags And on the hut a hammer and sickle And in the hut death and famine No cows left, no pigs at all Just your picture on the wall "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder QUOTES

191 " Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz The poor child cries as alone he goes There’s no bread and there’s no fat The party’s ended all of that Seek not the gentle nor the mild A father’s eaten his own child The party man he beats and stamps And sends us to Siberian camps38 "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

192 " It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral. "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

193 " As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: “Any of the comrades who can’t see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we’ll have to feed.”4 "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

194 " 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

195 " So having a passport is not a sign of surrender. On the contrary, it is liberating, since it creates the possibility of new experiences. It allows us to see how other people, sometimes wiser than we, react to similar problems. Since so much of what has happened in the last year is familiar to the rest of the world or from recent history, we must observe and listen. "

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

196 " No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressor, the Germans always the victims. "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

197 " When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning. "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

198 " The German communist party, for years the strongest outside the Soviet Union itself, was broken in a matter of a few months. Its defeat was a serious blow to the prestige of the international communist movement.11 "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

199 " The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration camps. The "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

200 " The Germans murdered about as many non-Jews as Jews during the war, chiefly by starving Soviet prisoners of war (more than three million) and residents of besieged cities (more than a million) or by shooting civilians in “reprisals” (the better part of a million, chiefly Belarusians and Poles). "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin