War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
HANNAH ARENDTJustice 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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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 language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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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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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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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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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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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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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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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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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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