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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers

Hannah Arendt

Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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Government Politics
Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Evil Failure Thinking
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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Greatness Poet Survive
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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Oneself Right World
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Beginning Politics Problem Revolution
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Crime Politics True
The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Absence Deep
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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Enemy Greatness Laughter
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Evil Himself Learning Word
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
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Absence Power Violence
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
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Feeling Oppression People
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Courage Life Politics
The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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Creation Hide Promise
The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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Effort Escape History Ideas Responsibility
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Old Philosophy Truth
To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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Courage Intelligence Thinking

A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers

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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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