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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.

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
Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
HANNAH ARENDT

Deed Importance Justice Suffering
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 ARENDT

Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
HANNAH ARENDT

Act Easy Thinking
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
The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Existence History Human Man Perfection
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
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Development Different See
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
HANNAH ARENDT

Existence World
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
HANNAH ARENDT

Life Presence Shallow
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT

Children Nation
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDT

Himself Philosophy Suffering
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
HANNAH ARENDT

Crime Enough Power Punishment
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
HANNAH ARENDT

Luxury Nation War
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Power Violence

What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.

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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.

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