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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.

Hannah Arendt

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
HANNAH ARENDT

Acceptance Nation
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Quite Wrong
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Death Man
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Direction Human Life Nature Possible Presence Wild
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
HANNAH ARENDT

Forgiveness History
Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
HANNAH ARENDT

Anger Justice Oneself
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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Alive Deep Life Metaphor Possible Thinking
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Forgiveness Freedom
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
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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Opinion Powerful Race
Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
HANNAH ARENDT

Material Power
A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
HANNAH ARENDT

Development Failure Life Man Quite Thinking
To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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Courage Intelligence Thinking
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Life Presence Shallow
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
HANNAH ARENDT

Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
HANNAH ARENDT

Death Kill People

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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