The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDTThe 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.
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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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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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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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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 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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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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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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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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.
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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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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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