Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
HANNAH ARENDTWhat makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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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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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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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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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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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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