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.
HANNAH ARENDTThe sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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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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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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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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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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 curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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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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
HANNAH ARENDT