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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.

Hannah Arendt

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Human Live Philosophy
For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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End Ideas Misery Poor
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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Argument Avoid Control Present
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 ARENDT

Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
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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Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Dream Perspective True
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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Evil Survive
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Death Deep Life Philosophy
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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Lying Power Revolution Weapon
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
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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Act Action Possible
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Courage Life Politics
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Deed Importance Justice Suffering
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ideas Reality World

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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