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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.

Hannah Arendt

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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Hands Hate Politics Violence
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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Deed Importance Justice Suffering
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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Destruction Establishment Old Violence
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
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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Attraction Politics Won
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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Government Man Nature
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Action Forgiveness Freedom
It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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Hate Man People Power Reality Tolerance
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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Courage Intelligence Thinking
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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Attention Reality Resistance
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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Oneself Right World
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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Appearance Connection Life Survive
Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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Material Power
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Power Violence

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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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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