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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

Hannah Arendt

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.
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Best Crime Excuse Possible
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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Heart Man Mindset Passion
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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Anger Justice Oneself
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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Commitment Evil Need Religious
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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Ideas Reality World
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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Evil Goodness Mindset People Sad Truth
The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
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Government Man Nature
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Courage Life Politics
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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Hands Hate Politics Violence
Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Evil Failure Thinking
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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Feeling Quite Wrong
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
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Lying Power Revolution Weapon
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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Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
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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Destruction Establishment Old Violence
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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Greatness Poet Survive
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
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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Greatness Oneself
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?
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Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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Argument Avoid Control Present
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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Crime Liberty Nation Violence
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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Action Human Live Philosophy
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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Opinion Powerful Race
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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Feeling Slave
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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Creation Hide Promise
Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
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Easy Forget Goodness True World
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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Destruction Forever Ourselves Safety Secure

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

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