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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.

Hannah Arendt

For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
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Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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Art Believe People Politics
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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Greatness Poet Survive
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Beginning Politics Problem Revolution
What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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Hate Man People Power Reality Tolerance
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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Oneself Right World
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Language Public
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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Anger Justice Oneself
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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Ideas Life
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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Beginning Born Freedom Identify Man Philosophy
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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Absence Power Violence
The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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Creation Hide Promise
The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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Effort Escape History Ideas Responsibility
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Act Action Possible
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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Advice Reality
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Destruction Education
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
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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Government Politics
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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Action Human Live Philosophy
Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
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Easy Forget Goodness True World
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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Attention Reality Resistance
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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Greatness Oneself
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Crime Enough Power Punishment
Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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Development Different See
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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Freedom Ourselves
Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
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Fall History Place

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, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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