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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

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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Deep Life Metaphor Possible Thinking
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

Greatness Oneself
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attention Reality Resistance
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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Commitment Evil Greatness Human Person
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Act Easy Thinking
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst
Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
HANNAH ARENDT

Easy Forget Goodness True World
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ideas Life
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
HANNAH ARENDT

Easy Hands Life Love Time Yourself
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 curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Deep
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Absence Power Violence
What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Action Human Live Philosophy
There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Death Kill People
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDT

Feeling Slave

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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