# Timothy Snyder - Quotes: 13 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder ## Books - [On Tyranny](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny.md) — 7 quotes - [The Road to Unfreedom](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/the-road-to-unfreedom.md) — 6 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raise a millennial generation without history. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/the-road-to-unfreedom/americans-reasoned-that.md) > Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/fascists-rejected-reason.md) > [A] turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance... In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland... In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war... shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest... Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify... the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. ...On February 3, 2010... the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal: a joint commemoration... on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. On the seventh of April a Polish government delegation... arrived in Russia. > > Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out... One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta... April 10... Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed... short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/the-road-to-unfreedom/a-turning-point.md) > Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/americans-today-are.md) > Since the American colonies declared their independence... [m]any... democracies... failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/since-the-american.md) > The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/the-road-to-unfreedom/the-twentieth-century.md) > The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of the voters. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/the-road-to-unfreedom/the-financial-crisis.md) > By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump... an outcome the Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, the new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate ... nor condemn Nazis in his own country. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/the-road-to-unfreedom/by-2015-russia.md) > As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/as-they-knew.md) > The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/the-mistake-is-to-assume.md) > "[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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/e-ternal-vigilance-is-the.md) > European democracies collapsed into and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. ...[S]ocieties can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny/european-democracies-collapsed.md)