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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.

Hannah Arendt

Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Slave
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
HANNAH ARENDT

Crime Politics True
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDT

Himself Philosophy Suffering
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT

Children Nation
The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Deep
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDT

Live Suffering World Wrong
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
HANNAH ARENDT

Development Different See
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Government Man Nature
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Deep Life Metaphor Possible Thinking
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Lying Power Revolution Weapon
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Power Violence
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Anger Justice Oneself
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Deed Importance Justice Suffering
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
HANNAH ARENDT

Nation Politics Support

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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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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