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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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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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 holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
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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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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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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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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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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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