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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

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
Evil comes from a failure to think.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Failure Thinking
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Oppression People
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
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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Feeling Slave
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Children Nation
It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
HANNAH ARENDT

Difference Equality Literature
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Human Live Philosophy
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
HANNAH ARENDT

Enemy Greatness Laughter
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
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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Crime Liberty Nation Violence
What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Lying Power Revolution Weapon
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Lie Quality Reality Stop Thinking World
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDT

Destruction Education
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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