Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
HANNAH ARENDTEvil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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.
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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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There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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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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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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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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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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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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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.
HANNAH ARENDT