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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

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
Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
HANNAH ARENDT

Anger Justice Oneself
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
HANNAH ARENDT

Life Presence Shallow
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
HANNAH ARENDT

Forgiveness History
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Himself Learning Word
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
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
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
HANNAH ARENDT

Luxury Nation War
For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
HANNAH ARENDT

End Ideas Misery Poor
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Death Man
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
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Best Crime Excuse Possible
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
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Goodness Mindset People Sad Truth

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.

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Popular Authors

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