The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDTTo be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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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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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.
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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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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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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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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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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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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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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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