Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
HANNAH ARENDTNo punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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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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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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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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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
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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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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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