Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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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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.
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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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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.
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Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
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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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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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.
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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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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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It 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.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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