The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDTSocial and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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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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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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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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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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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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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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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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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 language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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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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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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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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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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