Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
HANNAH ARENDTSlavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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.
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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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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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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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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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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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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
HANNAH ARENDT