Hannah Arendt Quotes
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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
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For excellence, the presence of others is always required.
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
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Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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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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Kant ... discovered 'the scandal of reason,' that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
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Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
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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.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
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Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false-not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats.
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The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.