The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
HANNAH ARENDTWisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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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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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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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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.
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What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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