Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDTEvil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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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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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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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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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
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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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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than 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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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