Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
HANNAH ARENDTWhat we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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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.
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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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The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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