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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

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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Age Virtue Wisdom Young
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
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
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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Lie Quality Reality Stop Thinking World
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Act Action Possible
The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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Creation Hide Promise
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Life Presence Shallow
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Action Forgiveness Freedom
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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Best Crime Excuse Possible
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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Argument Avoid Control Present
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
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Development Failure Life Man Quite Thinking
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
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
Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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Material Power
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Children Nation
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Act Easy Thinking
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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Feeling Slave
In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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Character Evil Lost People
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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Danger Philosophy Thinking
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
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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Difference Equality Literature
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.
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Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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End Ideas Misery Poor
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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Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Existence World

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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