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For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

Hannah Arendt

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

Beginning Born Death Man
We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Heart Man Mindset Passion
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
HANNAH ARENDT

Argument Avoid Control Present
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Greatness Oneself
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
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
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.
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Commitment Evil Need Religious
A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
HANNAH ARENDT

Development Failure Life Man Quite Thinking
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
HANNAH ARENDT

Moral Philosophy
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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Best Crime Excuse Possible
Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Evil Failure Thinking
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
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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Opinion Powerful Race
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ideas Life
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Force Love Nature Politics Powerful Reason

For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

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For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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