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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.

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
Dramatic
Totalitarianism
Conviction
Totalitarian
Among
Refinement
Century
Martyr
Dies
Convictions
Death
Permit
Government
Belongs
Great
Opponents
Refinements

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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.
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I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .
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The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
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The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible.
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every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.
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The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
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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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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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Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
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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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A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
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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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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
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