ANNE APPLEBAUM

The Greeks do not have the option of borrowing because nobody will lend to them.

… a repressed society needs a motivated populace if it is to become politically vibrant again. To be more precise, it needs patriotism, historical consciousness, education, ambition, optimism and, especially, patience. The destruction wrought by totalitarian governments always takes decades even generations to repair.

The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.

My favorite Polish foods are the soups, and particularly the sour soups, which I don't think I've ever had anywhere else. Zurek, sour bread soup, as well as chlodnik, a cold soup made with beetroot and yogurt, are really unique to Polish cuisine.

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.

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

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.'

Birtherism surely increased Americans' distrust of politics, though in ways that are hard to pin down. By contrast, when anti-vaxxers persuade parents not to vaccinate children, the result can be sickness and even death.

Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie - it's to make people fear the liar.

America's international broadcasters are an important part of the face we present to the world.

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

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.

The Occupy movement flared and then seemed to fizzle out - until it re-emerged in the form of Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and in the far-left surge that made Jeremy Corbyn leader of the British Labour Party.

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

Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values.

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.

All nations are imagined communities, and our imagined community is based on a uniquely inspiring set of principles. Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil.

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.

Many people no longer trust major media outlets to give them valuable information - and they may never do so again.

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

At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.

Military force can't defeat ideology.

Alongside the flat-earthers, 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have always had a special distinction: They can do immediate and specific damage in a way that the others can't.

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.

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.