To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
HANNAH ARENDTUnder conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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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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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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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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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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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?
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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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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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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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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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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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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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