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

Hannah Arendt

Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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Deed Importance Justice Suffering
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
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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Feeling Oppression People
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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Feeling Quite Wrong
Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Evil Failure Thinking
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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Alive Deep Life Metaphor Possible Thinking
The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Absence Deep
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Life Presence Shallow
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
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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Opinion Powerful Race
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
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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Attraction Politics Won
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Evil Lost Quality
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
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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Evil Goodness Mindset People Sad Truth

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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