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.
HANNAH ARENDTOnly the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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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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What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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