The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDTEvil comes from a failure to think.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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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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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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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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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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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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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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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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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