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 ARENDTAs citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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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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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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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
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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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Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
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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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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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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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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 language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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