What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
HANNAH ARENDTMan 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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.
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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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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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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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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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It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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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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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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.
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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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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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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.
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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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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.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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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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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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