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
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.
Interpretation
Totalitarianism emerges when the distinction between public and private life disappears.
Timothy D. Snyder highlights the gradual emergence of totalitarianism rather than a sudden takeover. He argues that such a regime begins to take shape when individuals can no longer differentiate between their private thoughts and public expressions, leading to a controlled and oppressive society where freedom is severely compromised.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of maintaining civil liberties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.
Of all the animal creations of God, main is the only animal who has been created in order that he may know his Maker. Man's aim is life is not therefore to add from day to day to his material prospects and to his material possessions, but his predominant calling is, from day to day to come nearer to his own Maker.
When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.
If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.
Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise.
I don't like the subtle infiltration of 'something for nothing' philosophies into the very hearthstone of the American family. I believe that 'Thou shalt earn the bread by the sweat of thy face' was a benediction and not a penalty. Work is the zest of life; there is joy in its pursuit.
Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.
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