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 ARENDTTo be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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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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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.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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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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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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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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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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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
HANNAH ARENDT