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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?

Hannah Arendt

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Direction Human Life Nature Possible Presence Wild
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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Action Human Live Philosophy
The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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Lie Quality Reality Stop Thinking World
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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Destruction Establishment Old 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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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Children Nation
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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Government Politics
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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Freedom Ourselves
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
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Change Revolution
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
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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Lying Power Revolution Weapon
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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Luxury Nation War
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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Heart Man Mindset Passion
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Quite Wrong

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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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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