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.
HANNAH ARENDTForgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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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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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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