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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

Hannah Arendt

There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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Argument Avoid Control Present
The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
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Crime Liberty Nation Violence
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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Enemy Greatness Laughter
Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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Opinion Powerful Race
Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
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Anger Justice Oneself
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Act Easy Thinking
In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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Character Evil Lost People
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
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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Development Failure Life Man Quite Thinking
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
Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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Easy Effort World
There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Death Kill People
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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Himself Philosophy Suffering
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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Lie Quality Reality Stop Thinking World
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Children Nation
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

Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

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