To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDTWhat we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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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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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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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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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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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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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
HANNAH ARENDT