And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDTOnly 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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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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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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.
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The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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The 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.
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Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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