A Quote by Timothy D. Snyder

The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror - real or fake, provoked or accidental - can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

Timothy D. Snyder

Quote Topics

Accidental Acts Acts Of Terror Aspiring Blow Deal Death Democracy Fake Forgotten Lesson Occasion Provide Provoked Real Terror Today Tyrants

Quote Author

Timothy D. Snyder
American - Author
Born: August 18, 1969

The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax [CIA code for the August 1953 coup] taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.

Stephen Kinzer

The foolish acts of others ought to serve more as a lesson to us than an occasion to laugh at those who commit them.

Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

Death is natural and necessary, but not just. It is a random force of nature; survival is equally accidental. Each loss is an occasion to remember that survival is a gift.

Harriet McBryde Johnson

The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow an any cost. To delay action is the same as death.

Vladimir Lenin

With modelling, you provide an image that is fake; with acting you have to provide an image that's real.

Olga Kurylenko

Real person. real name. I won't divulge too much, but it's not a fake name. And it's not a fake person. I guess that's the best answer I can say: It's not a fake name and it's not a fake person. But it's not her real name and it's not a real person either.

Justin Vernon

I am a middle-aged opera queen in loafers that makes out I am a 16 year old death metal skater... It's all fake! My hair is fake, my body is fake and my teeth are kind of fake

Rick Owens

We must ensure that these acts of terror do not accomplish in a slow burn what the fires of the World Trade Center and Pentagon could not - subversively destroying the foundation of our democracy.

John Conyers

Our enemies can deal a blow to us any time they wish. They did not wait for permission to do this. They do not deal a blow with prior notice. They do not take action because they can't.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?

Roger Scruton

The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.

Lois McMaster Bujold

It is aspiring tyrants who say that 'civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.' Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.

Timothy D. Snyder

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

Ada Louise Huxtable

While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.

Anthea Butler

It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.