Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Applebaum

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

The impact of Brexit is likely to be slow and incremental, hardly the sudden transformation that some Leave voters wanted. Immigrants will not disappear, and manufacturing will not immediately return to northern-English cities - quite the contrary.

Nationalism has nothing to do with the rule of law, justice, or opportunity.

Amazingly, quite a few people, even some American conservatives, are taken in by Russian tactics.

The Brexit campaign was transformed from a fringe eccentricity into a mass movement by a handful of people who decided to make it into an argument about identity.

The so-called cancel culture on the Internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses and newsrooms, and the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight.

Just shouting about 'facts' will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce them.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.

Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values.

Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.

There's a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There's a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we - our nation - are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet?

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.

The anti-European Tories were a fringe group - until they took over their whole party.

Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.

The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians.

One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies.

Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant - whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all.

At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.

Many people no longer trust major media outlets to give them valuable information - and they may never do so again.

Inside the noisy and chaotic modern information sphere, the message doesn't matter nearly as much as the messenger.

From my point of view, the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause celebre. Just one court case - one disputed trial - plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another.

The relationship of Trump to Russia has been reported on, and the activity to change the Republican platform happened openly, and Trump's support for Russian policy - Russia's views of Europe and its views of NATO - have been stated. So it's not like this is secret.

At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one's nation, of one's ideology, of one's morality, of one's values.

Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.

Even in the best of times, the United States' ability to influence events in faraway places is limited. The tools we have, from soft power and diplomacy to sanctions and bombing campaigns, are never guaranteed to succeed.

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.

Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions.

As a nation, we are not good at long-term planning, and no wonder: Our political system insists that every president be allowed to appoint thousands of new officials, including the kinds of officials who think about pandemics. Why is that necessary?

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

All over the world, the Trump administration is pursuing a range of policies: tweeting insults at Maduro, negotiating with a defiant North Korea, sending a small fleet of warships to the Persian Gulf to intimidate Iran. But the speed with which the president always sours on these efforts means they can never be part of any discernible strategy.

What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.

Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world.

Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue.

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.

Many bad books have had great influence.

False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited - or when they are battered by rubber bullets.

Military force can't defeat ideology.

Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare - these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.

Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union - accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.

The Occupy movement flared and then seemed to fizzle out - until it re-emerged in the form of Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and in the far-left surge that made Jeremy Corbyn leader of the British Labour Party.

Profound political shifts - events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances - do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown.

If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

Even in Poland, where the president is far less powerful than the prime minister, people have a deeper and more atavistic relationship with the person who is a serious contender to become head of state. They want their national leader - the tribal chief - to look like them, to live like them, to reflect their values.

For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.

The most important funder of the British Brexit campaign had odd Russian contacts. So did some cabinet ministers in Poland's supposedly anti-Russian, hard-right government, elected after a campaign marked by online disinformation in 2015.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were 'historically obsolete' and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.

There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.

America's international broadcasters are an important part of the face we present to the world.

The hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored around the world, with the hope that they might eventually be of some political or commercial use.

For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump.

At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.

Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie - it's to make people fear the liar.

Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative.

Independent judges have always frustrated governments that don't see why unelected arbiters of the law should stand in their way.

Nationalism has nothing to do with democratic values: Authoritarians can be nationalists; indeed, most are.

Like SARS or Ebola, COVID-19 seems to be another disease that has jumped from the animal kingdom to the human and then traveled quickly because of trains, cars, airplanes, and people clustering in public places.