The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
HANNAH ARENDTForgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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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 comes from a failure to think.
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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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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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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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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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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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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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