German - Historian | October 14, 1906 - December 4, 1975
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
Hannah Arendt
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
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Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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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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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
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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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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
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