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.
HANNAH ARENDTHalf of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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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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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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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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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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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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
HANNAH ARENDT