For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
HANNAH ARENDTThe third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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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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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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 point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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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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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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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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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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