Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
HANNAH ARENDTTo be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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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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If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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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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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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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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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.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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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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