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 ARENDTCourage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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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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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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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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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The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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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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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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