The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
HANNAH ARENDTCompared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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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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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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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.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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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The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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