HC Russell

“Beginning in the 1930s, an incipient American welfare state took shape. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” described the shift from imperial expansion to social mobility. For many Americans, these were the decades of the American Dream. Through the 1970s, the gap between the richest and the rest was closing, enabling ever more Americans to join a broad middle class. The American Dream meant social mobility. Rather than promising more land forever, it offered a sense of unpredictable but possible social advancement on the present territory of the United States. Mobility was no longer about families settling down on land but about new generations creating new kinds of lives.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree.”
― 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

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