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.
HANNAH ARENDTMen, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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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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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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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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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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The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
HANNAH ARENDT






