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.
HANNAH ARENDTIn 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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.
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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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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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 only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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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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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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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.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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