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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

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Freedom Liberty Man Necessary Success Win
Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Evil Failure Thinking
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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Absence Power Violence
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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Freedom Ourselves
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
Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
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Fall History Place
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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Best Crime Excuse Possible
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Life Presence Shallow
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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Effort Escape History Ideas Responsibility
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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Advice Reality
But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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Moral Philosophy
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
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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Ideas Life
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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Existence 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
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
HANNAH ARENDT

Forgiveness History

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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