Meredith

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, he added that, the mana of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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 the saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others.

We see ourselves as the 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 was such that American democracy must be defended from Americans, who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy. Ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.

The odd American idea, that giving money to political campaigns is free speech, means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in affect far more voting power than other citizens.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“A party emboldened by a favorable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within. When fascists or Nazis or communists did well in elections in the 1930s or 1940s, what followed was some combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics. Slicing off layers of opposition one by one.

Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century