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There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

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
Thoughtlessness
Interdependence
Strange
Evil

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The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
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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.
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They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world's reality is actually expressed by their escape.
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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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While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.
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Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature.
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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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The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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Where all are guilty, no one is confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
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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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The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.
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Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.
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Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.
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For excellence, the presence of others is always required.
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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
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A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.
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