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.
HANNAH ARENDTComprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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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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.
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