Megan

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions--even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century