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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.

Hannah Arendt

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
HANNAH ARENDT

Nation Politics Support
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 ARENDT

Best Crime Excuse Possible
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
HANNAH ARENDT

Opinion Powerful Race
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
HANNAH ARENDT

Act Action Possible
What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT

Children Nation
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT

Advice Reality
Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
HANNAH ARENDT

Appearance Connection Life Survive
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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Evil Survive
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Death Man
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDT

Road Sanity
The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
HANNAH ARENDT

Effort Escape History Ideas Responsibility
Evil comes from a failure to think.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Failure Thinking

The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.

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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.

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