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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Hannah Arendt

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
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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Evidence Future Violence War
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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Courage Intelligence Thinking
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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Development Different See
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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Feeling Quite Wrong
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
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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Beginning Born Freedom Identify Man Philosophy
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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Argument Avoid Control Present
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Death Deep Life Philosophy
A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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Development Failure Life Man Quite Thinking
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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Danger Philosophy Thinking
Justice 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.
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Deed Importance Justice Suffering
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Old Philosophy Truth
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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Difference Equality Literature
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Crime Politics True
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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Advice Reality

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

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