Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Anne Applebaum

Quote by Anne Applebaum

“...the polarizing political movements of twenty-first-century Europe demand much less of their followers. They do not espouse a full-blown ideology, and thus they don't require violence or terror police. They want their clercs to defend them, but they do not force them to proclaim that black is white, that war is peace, and that state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don't deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it's been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.”

Quote by Anne Applebaum

Work

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a renowned journalist and author, born on July 25, 1964. She is known for her in-depth investigative reporting and profound analysis of historical events. more

You May Also Like

“We cannot know the truth but we can pretend that we know. And this is lying. Lying fills all our life. People pretend that they know all sorts of things: about God, about the future life, about the universe, about the origin of man, about evolution, about everything; but in reality they do not know anything, even about themselves. And every time they speak about something they do not know as though they knew it, they lie.”