To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
HANNAH ARENDTThe curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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.
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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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What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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