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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

Hannah Arendt

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EvilLostQuality

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More Hannah Arendt Quotes

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  Evil comes from a failure to think.

  HANNAH ARENDT
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• 

  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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• 

  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.

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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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• 

  The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.

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• 

  There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.

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• 

  For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

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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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• 

  The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.

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• 

  When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

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• 

  Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.

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• 

  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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• 

  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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• 

  The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.

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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.

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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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