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
If you want to avoid criticism, then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people, then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Historians face criticism as they seek to explain the past, unlike those in industries focused on pleasing others.
This quote by Timothy D. Snyder highlights the inherent challenges faced by historians who strive to uncover and communicate truths about the past, often encountering criticism in the process. It contrasts the role of historians with that of individuals in industries like fashion or candy, which prioritize public approval over factual accuracy, suggesting that genuine understanding and explanation invite scrutiny regardless of the subject.
Themes
HistoryCriticismUnderstandingTruthExplanationProfession
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on historical analysis, one might say this quote to illustrate the challenges historians face.
More from Timothy D. Snyder
All quotes →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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
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History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.
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