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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

Hannah Arendt

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
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Dream Perspective True
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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Evil Survive
A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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Development Failure Life Man Quite Thinking
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Crime Enough Power Punishment
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Nation Politics Support
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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Art Believe People Politics
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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Argument Avoid Control Present
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
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
Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
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Fall History Place
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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Himself Philosophy Suffering
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 Himself Learning Word
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Old Philosophy Truth
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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Difference Equality Literature
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
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
Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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Desire Enjoyment Loss
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
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Lying Power Revolution Weapon
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
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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Absence Power Violence
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Action Forgiveness Freedom
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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Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
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Anger Justice Oneself

Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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