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 ARENDTThe only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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.
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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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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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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 most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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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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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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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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.
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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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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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