To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDTSocial and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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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.
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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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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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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.
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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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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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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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.
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