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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

Hannah Arendt

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Oneself Right 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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
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
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
There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Death Kill People
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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Beginning Born Death Man
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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Alive Existence History Human Man Perfection
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.
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Anger Justice Oneself
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
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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Ideas Reality World
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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Freedom Ourselves
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
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Courage Life Politics
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Act Easy Thinking
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Quite Wrong

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

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Popular Authors

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