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.
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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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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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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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 aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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.
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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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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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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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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
HANNAH ARENDT