It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
HANNAH ARENDTWhen an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Good 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.
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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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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 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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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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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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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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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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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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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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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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