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.
HANNAH ARENDTThe point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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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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As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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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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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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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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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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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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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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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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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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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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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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
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