The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
HANNAH ARENDTSlavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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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.
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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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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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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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Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
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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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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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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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