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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.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
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Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
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Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
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Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
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When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
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It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
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A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
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The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.
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Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
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All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.
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Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.
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Kant ... stated that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith, but all he had denied was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
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Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
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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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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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Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
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