There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
HANNAH ARENDTForgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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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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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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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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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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As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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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.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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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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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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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.
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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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Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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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.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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