The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
HANNAH ARENDTPower and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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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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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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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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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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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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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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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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