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There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Lead
Confusion
Holocaust
Colonies
Seem
Offer
Camps
Comparisons
Create
Slavery
Nowhere
Distract
Attention
Essential
Comparison
Prisons
Moment
Essentials
Concentration
Colony
Moments
Prison
Closer
Parallels
Seems
Offers
Helpful
Seeming
Banishment
Life
Labor
Forced
Examination
Penal

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Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
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Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
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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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Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.
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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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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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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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It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
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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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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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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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Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
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Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.
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the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.
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These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
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The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.
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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.
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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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