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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 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
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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Heart Man Mindset Passion
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Existence World
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 most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
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
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Courage Life Politics
In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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Character Evil Lost People
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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Enemy Greatness Laughter
The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
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Crime Liberty Nation Violence
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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Crime Politics True
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
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
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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Age Virtue Wisdom Young
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

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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