The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDTEvery generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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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.
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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.
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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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Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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