"The Belarusian failure therefore provides a useful test. Here we have an “ethnic group” which is the largest by far in the area in question. According to the Russian imperial census of 1897, more people spoke Belarusian in Vil’na province than all other languages combined. In Vil’na, Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, and Vitebsk provinces, contiguous territories of historic Lithuania, speakers of Belarusian were three quarters of the population. In the twentieth century, this “ethnic group” did not become a modern nation. In combination with Lithuanian and Polish successes, this Belarusian failure helps us to perceive what national movements actually need."

“The whole idea of the Declaration of Independence is that no man is above the law. ...King George was breaking established rules, established contracts. ...Mr. Trump's defense in the impeachment trial was precisely that he is above the law; that whatever he says is the law; that we should wait and see what he says, and then adapt the law to that. That is precisely what tyrants over the centuries, and authoritarians in the last century have always said.”

“Americans today are no wiser than than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.”

“Our second basic founding document, the Constitution, is basically a design how to prevent someone becoming a tyrant. It assumes that if we have three parts of the government they will balance each other, but what we saw unfold in the impeachment trial was the opposite. The Congress gave way, and then Justice Roberts also gave way. So that at the end... we have a much, much stronger executive claiming nearly absolute power, which is something that the Founders were precisely trying to prevent.”

“Fascists rejected reason... denying objective truth in favor of glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.”

“ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.”

“Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raise a millennial generation without history.”