HC Russell

“Social media make us more predictable than we need to be and so easier to rule.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“Tyrannies make anxiety seem normal. They attach a threat to a group (in this case Blacks) whom the authorities don’t really fear, then boast to their supporters of having protected them from that threat. They substitute relief from fear for freedom and teach citizens to confuse the two. The cycle of anxiety and release is not liberation, of course, but manipulation. It is not immobilizing the way that prison is. It is nevertheless a policy of immobility that extends from the Black bodies on the inside to other American minds on the outside.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“The oligarchical turn made mobility very difficult and warped the conversation about freedom. The more concentrated the wealth became, the more constrained was the discussion—until, in effect, the word freedom in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of a few wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom