Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
HANNAH ARENDTEvil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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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.
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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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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
HANNAH ARENDT