It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
HANNAH ARENDTJustice 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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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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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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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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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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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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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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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
HANNAH ARENDT