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

— Anne Applebaum A Warning From Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come (2018)

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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.

All Anne Applebaum quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

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.