We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
HANNAH ARENDTTo be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
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The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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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For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
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Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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