The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDTWisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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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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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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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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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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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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When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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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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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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The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
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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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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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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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