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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.

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
Police
Executioners
Becomes
Devour
Violence
Climax
State
Reached
States
Begins
Today
Terror
Children
Victim
Yesterday
Executioner

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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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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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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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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
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[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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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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It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
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Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
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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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Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
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The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
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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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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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