Timothy Snyder

Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions...

"[E]ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.