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.
HANNAH ARENDTEvil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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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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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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Justice 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.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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 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.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT






