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.
HANNAH ARENDTForgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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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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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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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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The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
HANNAH ARENDT






