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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

Hannah Arendt

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Survive
It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
HANNAH ARENDT

Difference Equality Literature
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Best Crime Excuse Possible
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Hate Man People Power Reality Tolerance
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT

Children Nation
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT

Advice Reality
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Slave
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
HANNAH ARENDT

Act Action Possible
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Argument Avoid Control Present
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Destruction Establishment Old Violence
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Change Revolution
The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Existence History Human Man Perfection
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Opinion Powerful Race
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
HANNAH ARENDT

Death Deep Life Philosophy
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDT

Language Public
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Quite Wrong

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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