The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
HANNAH ARENDTRevolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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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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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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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.
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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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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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.
HANNAH ARENDT






