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What 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.

Hannah Arendt

It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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Difference Equality Literature
There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Death Kill People
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
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
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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Experience Man Talk
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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Ideas Life
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
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
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
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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Luxury Nation War
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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Art Believe People Politics
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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Freedom Ourselves
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Act Action Possible
The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Absence Deep
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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Attraction Politics Won
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
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
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Feeling Oppression People
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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Evil Himself Learning Word
Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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Development Different See
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
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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Himself Philosophy Suffering
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Beginning Politics Problem Revolution
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Destruction Education
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Language Public
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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Government Politics
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

What 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.

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What 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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