Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions and emotions and myths.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Historians face criticism as they seek to explain the past, unlike those in industries focused on pleasing others.
This quote by Timothy D. Snyder highlights the inherent challenges faced by historians who strive to uncover and communicate truths about the past, often encountering criticism in the process. It contrasts the role of historians with that of individuals in industries like fashion or candy, which prioritize public approval over factual accuracy, suggesting that genuine understanding and explanation invite scrutiny regardless of the subject.
Themes
HistoryCriticismUnderstandingTruthExplanationProfession
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on historical analysis, one might say this quote to illustrate the challenges historians face.
More from Timothy D. Snyder
All quotes →Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of 'our institutions' unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
If we don't have access to facts, we can't trust each other. Without trust, there's no law. Without law, there's no democracy.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
Similar quotes
The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
John Henrik ClarkeRead
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
Abraham LincolnRead
For it was in the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Alfred Lord TennysonRead
Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.
Winston ChurchillRead
Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day (the 4th of July)? Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior?.
John Quincy AdamsRead
The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
H. L. MenckenRead