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.
HANNAH ARENDTIt 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.
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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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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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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Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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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 only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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