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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

Hannah Arendt

Evil comes from a failure to think.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Failure Thinking
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Life Presence Shallow
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
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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Destruction Forever Ourselves Safety Secure
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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Live Suffering World Wrong
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Commitment Mistake Reveal
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
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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Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
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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Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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Material Power
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Existence World
To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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Courage Intelligence Thinking
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

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

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