# On Tyranny

- Author: [Timothy Snyder](https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder.md)
- Quotes: 7
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/timothy-snyder/on-tyranny

## Quotes

> 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)

> 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)

> 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)