Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
HANNAH ARENDTNo 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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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 antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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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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As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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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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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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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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