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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Hannah Arendt

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
HANNAH ARENDT

Acceptance Nation
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Alive Existence History Human Man Perfection
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
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
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
We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
HANNAH ARENDT

Freedom Ourselves
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
HANNAH ARENDT

Death Deep Life Philosophy
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Development Different See
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
HANNAH ARENDT

Art Believe People Politics
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 most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Change Revolution
And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDT

Himself Philosophy Suffering
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT

Lying Power Revolution Weapon
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
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 ARENDT

Fall History Place
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
HANNAH ARENDT

Ideas Reality World

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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