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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.

Hannah Arendt

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
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

Hate Man People Power Reality Tolerance
To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
HANNAH ARENDT

Courage Intelligence Thinking
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Evil Need Religious
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

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

Enemy Greatness Laughter
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDT

Courage Life Politics
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
HANNAH ARENDT

Oneself Right World
Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
HANNAH ARENDT

Experience Man Talk
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
HANNAH ARENDT

Luxury Nation War
The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Existence History Human Man Perfection
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
HANNAH ARENDT

Direction Human Life Nature Possible Presence Wild
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Politics Won
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Desire Goodness Happiness Ourselves
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
HANNAH ARENDT

Danger Philosophy Thinking
In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
HANNAH ARENDT

Character Evil Lost People

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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