When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
HANNAH ARENDTPower 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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.
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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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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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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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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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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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