Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
HANNAH ARENDTJustice 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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.
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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.
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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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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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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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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?
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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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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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.
HANNAH ARENDT