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.
HANNAH ARENDTBeginning, 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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 aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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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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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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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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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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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.
HANNAH ARENDT






