"Personally about Mr. Trump, it tells me that his desire to protect himself, his ego, his appearance, his sense of being right, is bottomless, because if there's anything that you should hold back from doing, it's from punishing someone like Lt. Colonel Vindman. ...t calls up to me... a memory of whats are like, because that... is what is happening. People who refuse to tow the line, a line of fiction. A line which said that Ukraine plotted against the United States, and not Russia. A line that said a server was in Ukraine, which has never been the case. A line which said that Ukraine was corrupting us, when were trying to corrupt Ukraine, in fact, in the Trump administration. A line which was false. A set of statements which were clearly false and which Republican senators also know to be false. That you don't follow a line like that, and then get purged. That's what happens in... totalitarian systems."

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”