The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDTThe 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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 only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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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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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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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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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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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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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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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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.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world 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 thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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