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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.

Hannah Arendt

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Destruction Education
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Dream Perspective True
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Evil Himself Learning Word
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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Greatness Oneself
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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Absence Power Violence
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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Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Commitment Mistake Reveal
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Nation Politics Support
Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
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Commitment Evil Need Religious
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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Crime Liberty Nation Violence
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.
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Development Different See
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Courage Life Politics
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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Greatness Poet Survive

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.

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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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