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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

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Best Crime Excuse Possible
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Mistake Reveal
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Politics Won
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDT

Road Sanity
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attention Reality Resistance
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Power Violence
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Change Revolution
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT

Advice Reality
Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Freedom Identify Man Philosophy
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

Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDT

Himself Philosophy Suffering
Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Born Death Man
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
HANNAH ARENDT

Crime Politics True
A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
HANNAH ARENDT

Acceptance Nation
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Greatness Poet Survive

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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