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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.

Hannah Arendt

What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
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
Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
HANNAH ARENDT

Anger Justice Oneself
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Lie Quality Reality Stop Thinking World
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
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Lost Quality
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
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Opinion Powerful Race
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Hate Man People Power Reality Tolerance
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
HANNAH ARENDT

Nation Politics Support
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Oppression People
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
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
HANNAH ARENDT

Death Deep Life Philosophy
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
HANNAH ARENDT

Art Believe People Politics

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.

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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.

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