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?
HANNAH ARENDTWar has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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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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 point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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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And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
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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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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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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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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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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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