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The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.

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
Essence
Destructive
Humanity
Attempt
Impasse
May
Wherever
Coincide
Way
Total
Totalitarian
Men
Global
Ruled
Destroy
Domination
Destruction
Conquest
Victory
Begun

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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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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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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You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.
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Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.
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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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Thought and action must never part company.
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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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the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.
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Freedom from labor itself is not new it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah 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.
Hannah Arendt
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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Hannah Arendt
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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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What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt