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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.

Hannah Arendt

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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Age Virtue Wisdom Young
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Crime Enough Power Punishment
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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Greatness Oneself
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Dream Perspective True
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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Opinion Powerful Race
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Commitment Mistake Reveal
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
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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Easy Effort World
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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Government Man Nature
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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Government Politics
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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Enemy Greatness Laughter
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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Attraction Politics Won
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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Feeling Slave

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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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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