Tyranny By Snyder Quotes & Sayings

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny — Timothy Snyder

Extremism certainly sounds bad, and governments often try to make it sound worse by using the word terrorism in the same sentence. But the word has little meaning. There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream - as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny. — Timothy Snyder

So the people of Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly for the Elders, so the Elders put it into the people's heads that they themselves were the life forms that were supposed to spread out through the Universe. This was a preposterous ideas, of course. In the words of a nameless author: How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store. — Kurt Vonnegut

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. — Timothy Snyder

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. — Timothy Snyder

I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to 'Vogue,' and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don't have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop. — Hamish Bowles

But since her earliest days, America has inspired people from all over the world. Inspired them with the hope that one day their own countries would be one like this one. — Marco Rubio

If leadership is about anything, it's about leading. Not leading people back to where they already are, because they don't need that. They're already there. — Robert Reich

Life, Rose well knew, could throw some hard punches at you, but nothing hurt as much as losing a child, or seeing one of your children hurt and suffering. Becoming a parent changed you forever, as nothing else could. Not good or bad fortune. Not friendships. Not even a man or a woman. — Jennifer Donnelly

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. — Timothy Snyder

Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory. — Timothy Snyder

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. — Timothy Snyder

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual, and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism — Timothy Snyder