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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.

Hannah Arendt

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Lying Power Revolution Weapon
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Politics Problem Revolution
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Best Crime Excuse Possible
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Government Man Nature
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
HANNAH ARENDT

Luxury Nation War
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDT

Language Public
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDT

Road Sanity
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
HANNAH ARENDT

Death Deep Life Philosophy
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

Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Evil Need Religious
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Goodness Mindset People Sad Truth
Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
HANNAH ARENDT

Hands Hate Politics Violence
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
HANNAH ARENDT

Old Philosophy Truth
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Deep Life Metaphor Possible Thinking
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Slave
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Death Man

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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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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