dubc hobbs

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom