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.
HANNAH ARENDTForgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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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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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As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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