Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
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And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
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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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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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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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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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.
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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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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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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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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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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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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.
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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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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It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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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