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4de446e
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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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Hannah Arendt |
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bf78206
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In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian ma..
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Hannah Arendt |
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ebb1f07
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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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Hannah Arendt |
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7c60a04
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
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Hannah Arendt |
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05684d7
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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
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post-factual
totalitarianism
nazism
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Hannah Arendt |
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6fb0245
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Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
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thinking
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Hannah Arendt |
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56bf74f
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Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
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big-lie
post-factual
post-truth
reality-control
donald-trump
adolf-hitler
totalitarianism
fascism
propaganda
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Hannah Arendt |
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56909a8
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The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones 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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romance
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Hannah Arendt |
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f10b7bd
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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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politics
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Hannah Arendt |
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3b9f6d2
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Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because 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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history
race-theory
sophism
final-solution
historians
marxism
totalitarianism
antisemitism
ideology
communism
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Hannah Arendt |
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2d6d923
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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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politics
politics-language
totalitarianism
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Hannah Arendt |
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fc50b5c
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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Hannah Arendt |
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09184a9
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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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Hannah Arendt |
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ebad9a7
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Hannah Arendt |
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4c24ba8
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Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no "time to waste." He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankle..
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Hannah Arendt |
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4698ae3
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The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility--of being unable to undo what one has done--is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.
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plurality
promise
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Hannah Arendt |
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09fe9e6
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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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discussion
rhetoric
propaganda
logic
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Hannah Arendt |
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032a1cf
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As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered.
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Hannah Arendt |
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354b3bb
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It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.
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Hannah Arendt |
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6384143
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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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Hannah Arendt |
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fc20286
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Hannah Arendt |
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bbf6b49
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Real power begins where secrecy begins.
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Hannah Arendt |
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067282e
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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Hannah Arendt |