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

The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.

Hannah Arendt

Related Topics

AbsenceDeep

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  Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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  Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

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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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  A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.

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  Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

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  A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.

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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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  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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  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.

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  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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  To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.

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  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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  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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  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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  War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

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  Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.

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