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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Hannah Arendt

There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
HANNAH ARENDT

Death Kill People
The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
HANNAH ARENDT

Destruction Forever Ourselves Safety Secure
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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Evil Himself Learning Word
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT

Advice Reality
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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Government Politics
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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Destruction Education
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.
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Crime Politics True
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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Feeling Slave
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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Lie Quality Reality Stop Thinking World
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Beginning Politics Problem Revolution
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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Opinion Powerful Race
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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Feeling Oppression People
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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Action Battle Desire Power Revolution Violence
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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Live Suffering World Wrong
For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
HANNAH ARENDT

End Ideas Misery Poor

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

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