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 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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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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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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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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.
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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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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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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 only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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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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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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