The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
HANNAH ARENDTUnder conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
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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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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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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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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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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.
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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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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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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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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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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The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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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.
HANNAH ARENDT






