Anne Applebaum Quotes

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Anne Applebaum

Profession : Journalist

Birth : July 25, 1964

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

Anne Applebaum

The idea of social realist art and of Marxist journalism was that: 'We're going to tell people not what things were like, but what they should be like, and what they will be like, and we'll get them to keep focusing on the future.'

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

Just about every single person who visits me in Poland tells me that everything here is better than they thought it would be - especially the food.

Anne Applebaum

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

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

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

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

Anne Applebaum

Clearly, the inhabitants of stable democracies find it hard to appreciate what they have: 'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone' isn't just a song lyric; it's an expression of something fundamental about the human brain.

Anne Applebaum

Trump Tower is a beacon of aesthetic appeal by comparison to what the oligarchs build in their so-called cottages outside of Moscow. So he fits right into their aesthetic, he fits right into the way they think and the way act. Except of course they're more powerful than he is.

Anne Applebaum

Italians have famously low levels of trust in their government, and a tradition of medical hoaxes.

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.

Anne Applebaum

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

Anne Applebaum

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

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

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.

Anne Applebaum

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

Anne Applebaum