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
The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote. Our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our everyday choices have significant impacts and signify our values.
Timothy D. Snyder's quote emphasizes that even the smallest decisions and expressions shape the world around us. Every choice we make, whether vocal or silent, reflects our beliefs and priorities, influencing both ourselves and those around us, much like a vote that contributes to the larger societal outcome.
Themes
ChoicesImpactVoteWordsGesturesValues
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about social responsibility, you can quote this to inspire conscious decision-making.
More from Timothy D. Snyder
All quotes βDefend 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
Homicide, /n./ The slaying of one human by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he died by one kind or another - the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers.
Ambrose BierceRead
In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.
HerodotusRead
Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.
Christopher AlexanderRead
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
Gary ShteyngartRead
Don't seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.
Leo TolstoyRead
You must be a lotus, unfolding its petals when the sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it!
Sai BabaRead