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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.

Hannah Arendt

The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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Oneself Right World
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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Fall History Place
Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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Desire Enjoyment Loss
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
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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Force Love Nature Politics Powerful Reason
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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Easy Effort World
The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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Destruction Forever Ourselves Safety Secure
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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Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Old Philosophy Truth
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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Ideas Life
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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Destruction Establishment Old Violence
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Existence World
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Greatness Oneself

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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