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.
HANNAH ARENDTRevolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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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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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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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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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 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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