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.
HANNAH ARENDTGood works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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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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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.
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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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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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The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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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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