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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

Hannah Arendt

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
HANNAH ARENDT

Moral Philosophy
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDT

Courage Life Politics
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Change Revolution
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
HANNAH ARENDT

Life Presence Shallow
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDT

Destruction Education
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
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
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
Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
HANNAH ARENDT

Commitment Evil Need Religious
What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
HANNAH ARENDT

Hate Man People Power Reality Tolerance
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Evil Himself Learning Word
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ability Exercise Person Right Wrong
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDT

Language Public
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

Crime Politics True
To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
HANNAH ARENDT

Courage Intelligence Thinking
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
HANNAH ARENDT

Beginning Politics Problem Revolution

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.

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Popular Authors

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