Quotessence
Home / Authors / Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllPoliticsAuthoritarianismFreedomHistoryHolocaustTyrannyTruthDemocracyPhilosophySecond World WarUkraineBloodlandsFascismHitlerWwiiFactsGenocideHumanityRussiaSoviet Union

Famous Timothy Snyder Quotes

“The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.”

HumanityHolocaustWwiiSecond World WarHitlerStalinScholars
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Create image

“Adolf Hitler had no special animus toward Britain or its empire, and indeed imagined a division of the world into spheres of interests. He expected Churchill to come to terms after the fall of France. Churchill did not. He told the French that "whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.”

FightingSecond World WarHitlerChurchill
Book:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Create image

“How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power? Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food. p. 158”

IndustryEconomicsAgricultureWwiiModernitySecond World WarHitlerEmpireStalinBloodlands
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Create image