Timothy Snyder On Freedom Quotes

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

10 Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

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.

A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

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

In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. 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 political 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.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.

In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values.

The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

Without a sense of what should be, we cannot be clear about how what is could ever change.

But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

We chose freedom when we did not run.

We are told that we are "born free": untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman's blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

When politicians today invoke terrorism they are speaking, of course, of an actual danger. But when they try to train us to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two. Sometimes we do indeed gain one by losing the other, and sometimes not. People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

We cannot be neutral: we either deaden the world around us, or we make it more lively.

In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

When we are very young, we all need someone else's goodwill if we are to learn to stand at all. Because we live in time in a certain direction, we cannot make up later for what we were not given earlier.

the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Stand out: someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like.

Появилась даже такая шутка: Украина — это страна, где люди говорят по-русски, а Россия — это страна, где люди молчат по-русски [141].

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

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.

that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.

Taking a seat on the bench and listening to Mariia, I think about freedom. The village, one would say, has been liberated. Are its people free?

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.

to surrender freedom in the name of safety, we should be on our guard. There is no necessary tradeoff between the two.

You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The

It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive relationship or vote for a fascist. Similarly,

It is the government’s job to increase both freedom and security.

When we are trapped in fear we see everything in binary terms: us or them, fight or flight.

Якщо ніхто з нас не готовий загинути за свободу, усі ми загинемо під тиранією.

Люди, які запевняють вас, що безпека можлива лише коштом свободи, зазвичай хочуть забрати у вас і безпеку, і свободу.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom

Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree.

From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity. It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.

The absence of freedom threatens life, just as threats to life undermine freedom.

freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Social media make us more predictable than we need to be and so easier to rule.

When Americans think of freedom, we usually imagine a contest between a lone individual and a powerful government. We tend to conclude that the individual should be empowered and the government kept at bay. This is all well and good. But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer. Insofar as we take pride in these activities, and come to know others who do so as well, we are creating civil society. Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn.

... one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families.

A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like. Communists required all such groups to be officially registered and transformed them into institutions of control.

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.

Believe in truth: to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and the others will follow.

History allows us to see patterns and make judgements. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being cocreator of another.

We talked about how, over time, beginning in youth, an accumulation of decisions makes us who we are. Then a moment comes when we do what we must because of what we have chosen to become. An unfree person can always try to run. But sometimes a free person has to stay. Free will is character.

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

The occupiers had gotten in the way of a sense that the world was opening up, that the next generation would have a better life, that decisions made now would matter in years to come. ... Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.

We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come 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.

Those who believe themselves free because they dominate others define freedom negatively, as the absence of government, because only a government could emancipate the slaves or enfranchise the women. The conflation of a Liberty Bell with the American Revolution dodges the issue of what freedom is, and for whom that bell tolls.

None of us remembers being born, but all of us were born. None of us will remember dying, but we remember others dying. Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance at understanding it.

The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

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

But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer.

...we gain knowledge of ourselves when we acknowledge others. Only when we recognize that other people are in the same predicament as we are, live as bodies as we do, can we take seriously how they see us. When we identify with them as they regard us, we understand ourselves as we otherwise might not. Our own objectivity in other words, depends on the subjectivity of others.

In my childhood, the Soviet Union always seemed close, a few minutes' flight by intercontinental ballistic missile. Reader's Digest featured articles on Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. The obsession with the superpowers' destructive capacity was a way to ignore the people who suffered directly in the Cold War, such as the Latin Americans we kept invading and the East Europeans the Soviets kept invading.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant. Total doubt about all authority is naïveté about the particular authority that reads emotions and breeds cynicism. To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.

Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, of each of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz thought that such a notion of responsibility worked against loneliness and indifference. History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

Демокрациите умират, когато хората престават да вярват, че гласуването има значение. Въпросът не е в това дали се организират избори, а дали те са свободни и честни. Ако е така, демокрацията поражда усещане за време и очаквания за бъдещето, които успокояват настоящето. Смисълът на всеки демократичен избирателен процес е обещанието за следващия. Ако очакваме, че ще се състоят други пълноценни избори, ние знаем, че следващия път ще можем да коригираме грешките си, които междувременно стоварваме върху хората, които сме избрали. По този начин демокрацията преобразува човешката погрешимост в политическа предвидимост и ни помага да преживяваме времето като движение напред към едно бъдеще, върху което имаме някакво влияние. Ако смятаме, че изборите са просто един повтарящ ритуал на подкрепа, демокрацията губи своя смисъл.

As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.

The distinguished history professor Timothy Snyder wrote, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”1 Truth matters, but it is human nature to take solace in myths and believe they are true. However, many myths are deadly. The deadliest include American Slavery’s “positive good,” the “Noble South,” the “Lost Cause,” the evils of Reconstruction, the good of Jim Crow, and the nonexistence of institutional racism in the United States.

Sovereignty begins with birth and arises as a child is held, loved, reared, and educated. For the universe, a human birth is nothing special; for us humans, natality is the possibility of a life in freedom. We close that potential when we limit freedom to avoiding other objects, or begin our philosophy with death rather than life.

We don't borrow from an ideal world. We reach toward it and expand it.

What I remember is the way the bat felt in my hands when I struck the ball. I knew that I had hit it just right. I had that feeling of rightness on my palms, in my wrists, up my arms, and into my thin chest. I was an alienated teenager who could program a computer; earlier that year, in school, I had created a game called "Lifegame" and was excited and then a little disturbed by how it could take over players' attention. I had been obsessed since early childhood with the possibility that everything could be a simulation and that therefore I was not really alive. But when the bat hit the ball, I knew that I was.

This irresolvable disagreement about how to pursue happiness affirms a right to liberty. Happiness has to do with what we value. The things we hold dear are real, but none of us values the same things in the same way as anyone else, nor is there a single correct way to order all the virtues. There is no one good thing of which all the others are just parts or examples. If there were such a singular good, our universe would be different, and freedom would be impossible. Were humans to agree on the sources of happiness, we would be far simpler creatures, subject to programming, incapable of freedom.

In Russia, we see the transition from the definition of freedom as the lack of barriers to a politics of fascism in which there are no barriers to the Leader's whims. Yet Moscow's own propaganda position — that nothing is true and nothing is good — was not perceived as a danger. The invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the fallacy of economic determinism: oligarchic Russia was an aggressive empire, not an emerging democracy. For people who believed that freedom was negative, Russian nihilism did not seem hazardous. It was, of course. Any vacuum of facts and values will be filled with spectacle and war. The fascist nature of the Russian regime ought to have been clear well before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

A provocation works when a less powerful entity turns a more powerful actor against itself.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

I liked history’s inexhaustibility—a surprise awaited in each new book, behind each half-understood event, within each new language. The past is full of wild possibilities that were actually realized, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, or the American one. The east European revolutions of 1989, unpredictable as they had been, made me wonder whether other surprises might be coming.

Perhaps that hypothetical nuclear holocaust drew attention away from what the Jewish Holocaust might have taught us. A possible catastrophe involving long-range missiles overshadowed the recent demonstration of how easily a partially democratic system like ours could collapse, how quickly big lies could create restive alternative realities, and how callously humans could kill one another.

Postimperial immobility is not simply personal tragedy but the birth of tyranny.

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

3 Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. Thomas Jefferson probably never said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” but other Americans of his era certainly did. When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others. We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come 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. The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.

politics of catastrophe

Everyone we encounter is facing an unceasing succession of choices in their own arrangements of unique circumstances, applying their own combinations of values. When people are sovereign together, they generate unpredictability. And as they do, they recognize this in one another, welcome it, and gain from it. When we apprehend others are "leib", we see them doing what we are doing: making choices in the zone between the world of things and the world of values. Working together, people bring human unpredictability into the world - and joyfully. This helps us to be free of all the people and forces that would rule us by predicting us - or by making us more predictable. Free people are predictable to themselves but unpredictable to authorities and machines. Unfree people are unpredictable to themselves and predictable to rulers. Such unpredictability allows us to become free, together. The texture of the world of values enters our own world.

Some Americans seem to think that defending freedom of speech just means saying the words 'Free speech! Free speech!' over and over, like an incantation. Too often, our free speech 'debates' involve practiced provocateurs yelling 'Free speech!' after saying something they know to be untrue and obnoxious. ... These everyday trivializations of an important idea demand that we think carefully about how we speak of this fundamental right. If it becomes one more cliche, losing its sense of meaning, the thing itself will wither. The very phrase free speech, though we say it all the time, gets us on the wrong track. It suggests that speech is what is oppressed and what needs to be liberated. That is incorrect. There is no speech without a lieb, without a person. Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so they can speak. Freedom of speech means nothing without free speakers. Only people can take risks. Only people can be free.

Without factuality, every form of freedom is menaced.

We cannot enable freedom without institutions, that we cannot build without some shared sense of reality. Values will vary from person to person so it must be facts that anchor conversations about which structures we decide to build together. If we have different values, we will nevertheless sometimes have a shared interest in action. But if we have different facts, concord is impossible. We can disagree about how best to get clean water, but if we disagree as to whether lead is poisonous, we won't get far.

If it is agreed that facts are no different than opinions, the free person has no ground upon which to make a stand. If facts do not count, what James Madison called 'clamor and combinations' will always win. Which means tyrants and oligarchs will always win. But if facts are respected, each one of us is entitled at least to a hearing and has a shield against the Hail of Saturn. Even when we fail. there is dignity in trying.

If we lose track of the difference between 'it is true' and 'it feels right', we are not free. Forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right.

The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self. Believing a lie means serving a master, living or digital. That is a plausible end stations for us, deluded and unfree, living and dying in a tedious alternative reality.