Anne Applebaum Quotes

Author Image

Anne Applebaum

Profession : Journalist

Birth : July 25, 1964

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.

Anne Applebaum

The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians.

Anne Applebaum

Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.

Anne Applebaum

Military force can't defeat ideology.

Anne Applebaum

Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union - accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.

Anne Applebaum

There's a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There's a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we - our nation - are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet?

Anne Applebaum

One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies.

Anne Applebaum

Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world.

Anne Applebaum

Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant - whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all.

Anne Applebaum

Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

Anne Applebaum

Like SARS or Ebola, COVID-19 seems to be another disease that has jumped from the animal kingdom to the human and then traveled quickly because of trains, cars, airplanes, and people clustering in public places.

Anne Applebaum

As a nation, we are not good at long-term planning, and no wonder: Our political system insists that every president be allowed to appoint thousands of new officials, including the kinds of officials who think about pandemics. Why is that necessary?

Anne Applebaum

There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.

Anne Applebaum

At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.

Anne Applebaum

The impact of Brexit is likely to be slow and incremental, hardly the sudden transformation that some Leave voters wanted. Immigrants will not disappear, and manufacturing will not immediately return to northern-English cities - quite the contrary.

Anne Applebaum

If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.

Anne Applebaum

Many bad books have had great influence.

Anne Applebaum

From my point of view, the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause celebre. Just one court case - one disputed trial - plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another.

Anne Applebaum

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

Anne Applebaum

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

Anne Applebaum