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.
HANNAH ARENDTMan 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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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.
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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
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There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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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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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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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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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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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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Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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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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