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 ARENDTColonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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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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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The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
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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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Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
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To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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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.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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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