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.
HANNAH ARENDTThe 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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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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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
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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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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
HANNAH ARENDT