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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

Hannah Arendt

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
HANNAH ARENDT

Act Action Possible
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
HANNAH ARENDT

Easy Hands Life Love Time Yourself
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDT

Destruction Education
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Slave
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ideas Life
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDT

Language Public
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
HANNAH ARENDT

Old Philosophy Truth
Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
HANNAH ARENDT

Fall History Place
Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Freedom Identify Man Philosophy
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Survive
Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
HANNAH ARENDT

Desire Enjoyment Loss
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
HANNAH ARENDT

Moral Philosophy
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDT

Courage Life Politics
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
HANNAH ARENDT

Life Presence Shallow

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

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Popular Authors

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