No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
HANNAH ARENDTPlurality 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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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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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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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 in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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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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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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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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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