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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

Hannah Arendt

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
HANNAH ARENDT

Dream Perspective True
Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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Easy Effort World
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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Destruction Establishment Old Violence
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
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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Forgiveness History
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
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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Desire Enjoyment Loss
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
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 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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Alive Existence History Human Man Perfection
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
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.
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Direction Human Life Nature Possible Presence Wild
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT

Advice Reality
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDT

Himself Philosophy Suffering

Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

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