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.
HANNAH ARENDTWe first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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 only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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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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What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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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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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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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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And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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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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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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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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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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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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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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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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