Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
HANNAH ARENDTThe 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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 only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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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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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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The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
HANNAH ARENDT