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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.

Hannah Arendt

For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
HANNAH ARENDT

End Ideas Misery Poor
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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Road Sanity
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
Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
HANNAH ARENDT

Age Virtue Wisdom Young
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
HANNAH ARENDT

Dream Perspective True
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Effort Escape History Ideas Responsibility
What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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Action Company Man Thinking Togetherness
In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
HANNAH ARENDT

Character Evil Lost People
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
HANNAH ARENDT

Art Believe People Politics
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
HANNAH ARENDT

Direction Human Life Nature Possible Presence Wild
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Forgiveness History
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
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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Ideas Reality World
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
HANNAH ARENDT

Enemy Greatness Laughter
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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Language Public
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.
HANNAH ARENDT

Attraction Best Ideas Ourselves Time Worst

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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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