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.
HANNAH ARENDTCompared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
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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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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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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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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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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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Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
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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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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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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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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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