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Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

— Anne Applebaum Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012)

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More quotes by Anne Applebaum

Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity [...].

Twilight of Democracy (2020)

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017)

The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.

Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Anne Applebaum (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.