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.
HANNAH ARENDTIt was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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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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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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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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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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In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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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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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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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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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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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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