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Absence Of Thought Is Indeed A Powerful Factor In Human Affairs, Statistically Speaking The Most Powerful, Not Just In The Conduct Of The Many But In The Conduct Of All.

-Hannah Arendt

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Absence Of Thought Is

Hannah Arendt

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Absence Of Thought Is Indeed A Powerful Factor In Human Affairs, Statistically Speaking The Most Powerful, Not Just In The Conduct Of The Many But In The Conduct Of All.

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This Is The Precept By Which I Have Lived: Prepare For The Worst; Expect The Best; And Take What Comes.

The New Always Happens Against The Overwhelming Odds Of Statistical Laws And Their Probability, Which For All Practical, Everyday Purposes Amounts To Certainty; The New Therefore Always Appears In The Guise Of A Miracle.

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.

The Presence Of Others Who See What We See And Hear What We Hear Assures Us Of The Reality Of The World And Ourselves.

Every End In History Necessarily Contains A New Beginning.

Clichés, Stock Phrases, Adherence To Conventional, Standardized Codes Of Expression And Conduct Have The Socially Recognized Function Of Protecting Us Against Reality.

The Way God Has Been Thought Of For Thousands Of Years Is No Longer Convincing; If Anything Is Dead, It Can Only Be The Traditional Thought Of God.

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.

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.

The Chief Qualification Of A Mass Leader Has Become Unending Infallibility; He Can Never Admit An Error.

No Cause Is Left But The Most Ancient Of All, The One, In Fact, That From The Beginning Of Our History Has Determined The Very Existence Of Politics, The Cause Of Freedom Versus Tyranny.

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.

At Any Rate, Nothing Was More Characteristic Of Him [walter Benjamin] In The Thirties Than The Little Notebooks With Black Covers Which He Always Carried With Him And In Which He Tirelessly Entered In The Form Of Quotations What Daily Living And Reading Netted Him In The Way Of "pearls" And "coral." On Occasion He Read From Them Aloud, Showed Them Around Like Items From A Choice And Precious Collection.

Immortality Is What Nature Possesses Without Effort And Without Anybody's Assistance, And Immortality Is What The Mortals Must Therefore Try To Achieve If They Want To Live Up To The World Into Which They Were Born, To Live Up To The Things Which Surround Them And To Whose Company They Are Admitted For A Short While.

Luck Serves ... As Rationalization For Every People That Is Not Master Of Its Own Destiny.

If A Given Science Accidentally Reached Its Goal, This Would By No Means Stop The Workers In The Field, Who Would Be Driven Past Their Goal By The Sheer Momentum Of The Illusion Of Unlimited Progress.

Imperialism Was Born When The Ruling Class In Capitalist Production Came Up Against National Limits To Its Economic Expansion.

It Interrupts Any Doing, Any Ordinary Activities, No Matter What They Happen To Be. All Thinking Demands A Stop-and-think.

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.

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.

Kant ... Was Also Quite Aware That "the Urgent Need" Of Reason Is Both Different From And "more Than Mere Quest And Desire For Knowledge." Hence, The Distinguishing Of The Two Faculties, Reason And Intellect, Coincides With A Distinction Between Two Altogether Different Mental Activities, Thinking And Knowing.

Poets Are The Only People To Whom Love Is Not Only A Crucial, But An Indispensable Experience, Which Entitles Them To Mistake It For A Universal One.

What I Propose, Therefore, Is Very Simple: It Is Nothing More Than To Think What We Are Doing

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.

The Extreme Form Of Power Is All Against One, The Extreme Form Of Violence Is One Against All.

The Monstrous Sameness And Pervasive Ugliness So Highly Characteristic Of The Findings Of Modern Psychology, And Contrasting So Obviously With The Enormous Variety And Richness Of Overt Human Conduct, Witness To The Radical Difference Between The Inside And The Outside Of The Human Body.

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.

No Civilization Would Ever Have Been Possible Without A Framework Of Stability, To Provide The Wherein For The Flux Of Change. Foremost Among The Stabilizing Factors, More Enduring Than Customs, Manners And Traditions, Are The Legal Systems That Regulate Our Life In The World And Our Daily Affairs With Each Other.

In The Era Of Imperialism, Businessmen Became Politicians And Were Acclaimed As Statesmen, While Statesmen Were Taken Seriously Only If They Talked The Language Of Succcessful Businessmen.

Goodness That Comes Out Of Hiding And Assumes A Public Role Is No Longer Good, But Corrupt In Its Own Terms And Will Carry Its Own Corruption Wherever It Goes.

There Will Always Be One Against All, One Person Against All Others. [this Is So] Not Because One Is Terribly Wise And All Are Terribly Foolish, But Because The Process Of Thinking And Researching, Which Finally Yields Truth, Can Only Be Accomplished By An Individual Person. In Its Singularity Or Duality, One Human Being Seeks And Finds – Not The Truth (lessing) –, But Some Truth.

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.

Every Thought Is An Afterthought.

Caution In Handling Generally Accepted Opinions That Claim To Explain Whole Trends Of History Is Especially Important For The Historian Of Modern Times, Because The Last Century Has Produced An Abundance Of Ideologies That Pretend To Be Keys To History But Are Actually Nothing But Desperate Efforts To Escape Responsibility.

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

Well, Demonization Itself Can Help ... To Provide An Alibi. You Succumb To The Devil Incarnate, And As A Result You're Not Guilty Yourself.

Loving Life Is Easy When You Are Abroad. Where No One Knows You And You Hold Your Life In Your Hands All Alone, You Are More Master Of Yourself Than At Any Other Time

Ideologies - Isms Which To The Satisfaction Of Their Adherents Can Explain Everything And Every Occurence By Deducing It From A Single Premise - Are A Very Recent Phenomenon ... Not Before Hitler And Stalin Were The Great Political Potentialities Of The Ideologies Discovered.

Solitude Is The Human Condition In Which I Keep Myself Company. Loneliness Comes About When I Am Alone Without Being Able To Split Up Into The Two-in-one, Without Being Able To Keep Myself Company.

It Is In The Nature Of A Group And Its Power To Turn Against Independence, The Property Of Individual Strength.

Individual Strength

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.

If The Ability To Tell Right From Wrong Should Turn Out To Have Anything To Do With The Ability To Think, Then We Must Be Able To "demand" Its Exercise From Every Sane Person, No Matter How Erudite Or Ignorant, Intelligent Or Stupid, He May Happen To Be. Kant In This Respect Almost Alone Among The Philosophers Was Much Bothered By The Common Opinion That Philosophy Is Only For The Few, Precisely Because Of Its Moral Implications.

There Are No Dangerous Thoughts; Thinking Itself Is Dangerous.

Where Everybody Is Guilty, Nobody Is.

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.

Nihilism Is But The Other Side Of Conventionalism; Its Creed Consists Of Negations Of The Current So-called Positive Values, To Which It Remains Bound.

There Exists In Our Society Widespread Fear Of Judging…[b]ehind The Unwillingness To Judge Lurks The Suspicion That No One Is A Free Agent, And Hence Doubt That Anyone Is Responsible Or Could Be Expected To Answer For What He Has Done…who Has Ever Maintained That By Judging A Wrong I Presuppose That I Myself Would Be Incapable Of Committing It?

Man Cannot Be Free If He Does Not Know That He Is Subject To Necessity, Because His Freedom Is Always Won In His Never Wholly Successful Attempts To Liberate Himself From Necessity.

A Life Spent Entirely In Public, In The Presence Of Others, Becomes, As We Would Say, Shallow. While It Retains Its Visibility, It Loses Its Quality Of Rising Into Sight From Some Darker Ground Which Must Remain Hidden If It Is Not To Lose Its Depth In A Very Real, Non-subjective Sense.

We Are Free To Change The World And Start Something New In It.

Changing The World

With The Rise Of Christianity, Faith Replaced Thought As The Bringer Of Immortality.

By Its Very Nature The Beautiful Is Isolated From Everything Else. From Beauty No Road Leads To Reality.

Under Conditions Of Terror, Most People Will Comply But Some People Will Not.

The Ceaseless, Senseless Demand For Original Scholarship In A Number Of Fields, Where Only Erudition Is Now Possible, Has Led Either To Sheer Irrelevancy, The Famous Knowing Of More And More About Less And Less, Or To The Development Of A Pseudo-scholarship Which Actually Destroys Its Object.

Forgiveness Is The Only Way To Reverse The Irreversible Flow Of History.

Few Girls Are As Well Shaped As A Good Horse.

The Climax Of Terror Is Reached When The Police State Begins To Devour Its Own Children, When Yesterday's Executioner Becomes Today's Victim.

War Has Become A Luxury That Only Small Nations Can Afford.

Power Corresponds To The Human Ability Not Just To Act But To Act In Concert. Power Is Never The Property Of An Individual; It Belongs To A Group And Remains In Existence Only So Long As The Group Keeps Together. When We Say Of Somebody That He Is 'in Power' We Actually Refer To His Being Empowered By A Certain Number Of People To Act In Their Name. The Moment The Group, From Which The Power Originated To Begin With ... Disappears, 'his Power' Also Vanishes.

If We Do Not Know Our Own History, We Are Doomed To Live It As Though It Were Our Private Fate.

Total Loyalty Is Possible Only When Fidelity Is Emptied Of All Concrete Content, From Which Changes Of Mind Might Naturally Arise.

It Is Obvious: If You Do Not Accept Something That Assumes The Form Of ‘destiny,’ You Not Only Change Its ‘natural Laws’ But Also The Laws Of The Enemy Playing The Role Of Fate.

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.

The Possible Redemption From The Predicament Of Irreversibility - Of Being Unable To Undo What One Has Done - Is The Faculty Of Forgiving.

Truthfulness Has Never Been Counted Among The Political Virtues, And Lies Have Always Been Regarded As Justifiable Tools In Political Dealings.

By Assigning His Political Rights To The State The Individual Also Delegates His Social Responsibilities To It: He Asks The State To Relieve Him Of The Burden Of Caring For The Poor Precisely As He Asks For Protection Against Criminals. The Difference Between Pauper And Criminal Disappears - Both Stand Outside Society.

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.

Ideological Thinking Becomes Emancipated From The Reality That We Perceive With Our Five Senses, And Insists On A 'truer' Reality Concealed Behind All Perceptible Things, Dominating Them From This Place Of Concealment And Requiring A Sixth Sense That Enables Us To Become Aware Of It.

To Expect Truth To Come From Thinking Signifies That We Mistake The Need To Think With The Urge To Know.

To Speak Of The Impotence Of Power Is No Longer A Witty Paradox.

The Point, As Marx Saw It, Is That Dreams Never Come True.

The Will To Power, As The Modern Age From Hobbes To Nietzsche Understood It, Far From Being A Characteristic Of The Strong, Is, Like Envy And Greed, Among The Vices Of The Weak, And Possibly Even Their Most Dangerous One. Power Corrupts Indeed When The Weak Band Together In Order To Ruin The Strong, But Not Before.

The Emotions I Feel Are No More Meant To Be Shown In Their Unadulterated State Than The Inner Organs By Which We Live.

Only The Mob And The Elite Can Be Attracted By The Momentum Of Totalitarianism Itself. The Masses Have To Be Won By Propaganda.

Predictions Of The Future Are Never Anything But Projections Of Present Automatic Processes And Procedures, That Is, Of Occurrences That Are Likely To Come To Pass If Men Do Not Act And If Nothing Unexpected Happens; Every Action, For Better Or Worse, And Every Accident Necessarily Destroys The Whole Pattern In Whose Frame The Prediction Moves And Where It Finds Its Evidence.

Slavery's Crime Against Humanity Did Not Begin When One People Defeated And Enslaved Its Enemies (though Of Course This Was Bad Enough), But When Slavery Became An Institution In Which Some Men Were 'born' Free And Others Slave, When It Was Forgotten That It Was Man Who Had Deprived His Fellow-men Of Freedom, And When The Sanction For The Crime Was Attributed To Nature.

In Order To Go On Living One Must Try To Escape The Death Involved In Perfectionism.

Violence Is An Expression Of Impotence.

The Earth Is The Very Quintessence Of The Human Condition.

Every Activity Performed In Public Can Attain An Excellence Never Matched In Privacy; For Excellence, By Definition, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

The Conviction That Everything That Happens On Earth Must Be Comprehensible To Man Can Lead To Interpreting History By Commonplaces.

Violence Can Destroy Power; It Is Utterly Incapable Of Creating It.

I'm More Than Ever Of The Opinion That A Decent Human Existence Is Possible Today Only On The Fringes Of Society, Where One Then Runs The Risk Of Starving Or Being Stoned To Death. In These Circumstances, A Sense Of Humor Is A Great Help.

It Is My Contention That Civil Disobediences Are Nothing But The Latest Form Of Voluntary Association, And That They Are Thus Quite In Tune With The Oldest Traditions Of The Country.

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

When Evil Is Allowed To Compete With Good, Evil Has An Emotional Populist Appeal That Wins Out Unless Good Men And Women Stand As A Vanguard Against Abuse.

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.

Men Who No Longer Can Make Sure Of The Reality Which They Feel And Experience Through Talking About It And Sharing It With Their Fellow-men, Live In The Same Nightmare Of Loneliness And Uncertainty Which, In A Normal World, Is The Terrible Fate Of Insanity.

For Politics Is Not Like The Nursery; In Politics Obedience And Support Are The Same.

Manipulations Of Opinion, Insofar As They Are Inspired By Well-defined Interests, Have Limited Goals; Their Effect, However, If They Happen To Touch Upon An Issue Of Authentic Concern, Is No Longer Subject To Their Control And May Easily Produce Consequences They Never Foresaw Or Intended.

No Argument Can Persuade Me To Like Oysters If I Do Not Like Them. In Other Words, The Disturbing Thing About Matters Of Taste Is That They Are Not Communicable.

Just As The Law In Civilized Countries Assumes That The Voice Of Conscience Tells Everybody, "thou Shalt Not Kill," Even Though Man's Natural Desires And Inclinations May At Times Be Murderous, So The Law Of Hitler's Land Demanded That The Voice Of Conscience Tell Everybody: "thou Shalt Kill," Although The Organizers Of The Massacres Knew Full Well That Murder Is Against The Normal Desires And Inclinations Of Most People. Evil In The Third Reich Had Lost The Quality By Which Most People Recognize It - The Quality Of Temptation.

If Men Were Ever To Lose The Appetite For Meaning We Call Thinking, They Would Lose The Capacity For Asking All The Unanswerable Questions Upon Which Every Civilization Is Founded.

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.

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 .

... The Space Left To Freedom Is Very Small.ends Are Inherent In Human Nature And The Same For All.

The Greatest Enemy Of Authority, Therefore, Is Contempt, And The Surest Way To Undermine It Is Laughter.

Psychologically Speaking, One May Say That The Hypocrite Is Too Ambitious; Not Only Does He Want To Appear Virtuous Before Others, He Wants To Convince Himself.

Education Is The Point At Which We Decide Whether We Love The World Enough To Assume Responsibility For It, And By The Same Token Save It From That Ruin Which Except For Renewal, Except For The Coming Of The New And The Young, Would Be Inevitable. And Education, Too, Is Where We Decide Whether We Love Our Children Enough Not To Expel Them From Our World And Leave Them To Their Own Devices, Nor To Strike From Their Hands Their Chance Of Undertaking Something New, Something Unforeseen By Us, But To Prepare Them In Advance For The Task Of Renewing A Common World.

The Greater The Bureaucratization Of Public Life, The Greater Will Be The Attraction Of Violence. In A Fully Developed Bureaucracy There Is Nobody Left With Whom One Can Argue, To Whom One Can Represent Grievances, On Whom The Pressures Of Power Can Be Exerted. Bureaucracy Is The Form Of Government In Which Everybody Is Deprived Of Political Freedom, Of The Power To Act; For The Rule By Nobody Is Not No-rule, And Where All Are Equally Powerless We Have A Tyranny Without A Tyrant.

Nothing We Use Or Hear Or Touch Can Be Expressed In Words That Equal What Is Given By The Senses.

The Need Of Reason Is Not Inspired By The Quest For Truth But By The Quest For Meaning. And Truth And Meaning Are Not The Same. The Basic Fallacy , Taking Precedence Over All Specific Metaphysical Fallacies, Is To Interpret Meaning On The Model Of Truth.

For No Matter What Learned Scientists May Say, Race Is, Politically Speaking, Not The Beginning Of Humanity But Its End, Not The Origin Of Peoples But Their Decay, Not The Natural Birth Of Man But His Unnatural Death.

The True Dividing Line Between People Is Whether They Are Capable Of Being In Love With Their Destiny.

I'm Completely Against [feminism]. I Have No Desire To Give Up My Privileges.

All Political Institutions Are Manifestations And Materializations Of Power; They Petrify And Decay As Soon As The Living Power Of The People Ceases To Uphold Them.

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.

Revolutions Are The Only Political Events Which Confront Us Directly And Inevitably With The Problem Of Beginning.

No Punishment Has Ever Possessed Enough Power Of Deterrence To Prevent The Commission Of Crimes.

Totalitarianism Is Never Content To Rule By External Means, Namely, Through The State And A Machinery Of Violence; Thanks To Its Peculiar Ideology And The Role Assigned To It In This Apparatus Of Coercion, Totalitarianism Has Discovered A Means Of Dominating And Terrorizing Human Beings From Within.

Love, In Distinction From Friendship, Is Killed, Or Rather Extinguished, The Moment It Is Displayed In Public.

Friendship Love

Absence Of Thought Is Indeed A Powerful Factor In Human Affairs, Statistically Speaking The Most Powerful, Not Just In The Conduct Of The Many But In The Conduct Of All.

As Citizens, We Must Prevent Wrongdoing Because The World In Which We All Live, Wrong-doer, Wrong Sufferer And Spectator, Is At Stake.

Exasperation With The Threefold Frustration Of Action -- The Unpredictability Of Its Outcome, The Irreversibility Of The Process, And The Anonymity Of Its Authors -- Is Almost As Old As Recorded History. It Has Always Been A Great Temptation, For Men Of Action No Less Than For Men Of Thought, To Find A Substitute For Action In The Hope That The Realm Of Human Affairs May Escape The Haphazardness And Moral Irresponsibility Inherent In A Plurality Of Agents.

The Rule Of Nobody ... Is What The Political Form Known As Bureaucracy Truly Is.

Thought And Action Must Never Part Company.

Thoughts And Actions

Every Thought Is Strictly Speaking An After-thought.

The Chief Reason Warfare Is Still With Us Is Neither A Secret Death-wish Of The Human Species, Nor An Irrepressible Instinct Of Aggression, Nor, Finally And More Plausibly, The Serious Economic And Social Dangers Inherent In Disarmament, But The Simple Fact That No Substitute For This Final Arbiter In International Affairs Has Yet Appeared On The Political Scene.

Politically, The Weakness Of The Argument Has Always Been That Those Who Choose The Lesser Evil Forget Very Quickly That They Chose Evil.

Political Questions Are Far Too Serious To Be Left To The Politicians.

The Most Striking Difference Between Ancient And Modern Sophists Is That The Ancients Were Satisfied With A Passing Victory Of Argument At The Expense Of Truth, Whereas The Moderns Want A More Lasting Victory At The Expense Of Reality.

Our Last Will And Testament, Providing For The Only Future Of Which We Can Be Reasonably Certain, Namely Our Own Death, Shows Thatthe Will's Need To Will Is No Less Strong Than Reason's Need To Think; In Both Instances The Mind Transcends Its Own Natural Limitations, Either By Asking Unanswerable Questions Or By Projecting Itself Into A Future Which, For The Willing Subject, Will Never Be.

That Hegelian Dialectics Should Provide A Wonderful Instrument For Always Being Right, Because They Permit The Interpretations Of All Defeats As The Beginning Of Victory, Is Obvious. One Of The Most Beautiful Examples Of This Kind Of Sophistry Occurred After 1933 When The German Communists For Nearly Two Years Refused To Recognize That Hitler's Victory Had Been A Defeat For The German Communist Party.

Philosophy Is Called Upon To Compensate For The Frustrations Of Politics And, More Generally, Of Life Itself.

The Result Of A Consistent And Total Substitution Of Lies For Factual Truth Is Not That The Lie Will Now Be Accepted As Truth, And Truth Be Defamed As Lie, But That The Sense By Which We Take Our Bearings In The Real World - And The Category Of Truth Versus Falsehood Is Among The Mental Means To This End - Is Being Destroyed.

The Business Of Thinking ... Undoes Every Morning What It Had Finished The Night Before.

Action, As Distinguished From Fabrication, Is Never Possible In Isolation; To Be Isolated Is To Be Deprived Of The Capacity To Act.

The Essence Of Totalitarian Government, And Perhaps The Nature Of Every Bureaucracy, Is To Make Functionaries And Mere Cogs In The Administrative Machinery Out Of Men, And Thus To Dehumanize Them. And One Can Debate Long And Profitably On The Rule Of Nobody, Which Is What The Political Form Known As Bureau-cracy Truly Is….we Have Become Very Much Accustomed By Modern Psychology And Sociology, Not To Speak Of Modern Bureaucracy, To Explaining Away The Responsibility Of The Doer For His Deed In Terms Of This Or That Kind Of Determinism.

One Must Think With The Body And The Soul Or Not Think At All.

Culture Relates To Objects And Is A Phenomenon Of The World; Entertainment Relates To People And Is A Phenomenon Of Life.

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.

Jefferson, Though The Secret Vote Was Still Unknown At The Time Had At Least A Foreboding Of How Dangerous It Might Be To Allow The People To Share A Public Power Without Providing Them At The Same Time With More Public Space Than The Ballot Box And With More Opportunity To Make Their Voices Heard In Public Than On Election Day. What He Perceived To Be The Mortal Danger To The Republic Was That The Constitution Had Given All Power To The Citizens, Without Giving Them The Opportunity Of Being Citizens And Of Acting As Citizens.

The Public Sphere Is As Consistently Based On The Law Of Equality As The Private Sphere Is Based On The Law Of Universal Difference And Differentiation. Equality, In Contrast To All That Is Involved In Mere Existence, Is Not Given Us, But Is The Result Of Human Organization Insofar As It Is Guided By The Principle Of Justice. We Are Not Born Equal; We Become Equal As Members Of A Group On The Strength Of Our Decision To Guarantee Ourselves Mutually Equal Rights.

Fear Is An Emotion Indispensable For Survival.

To Be Free In An Age Like Ours, One Must Be In A Position Of Authority. That In Itself Would Be Enough To Make Me Ambitious.

Political Institutions, No Matter How Well Or Badly Designed, Depend For Continued Existence Upon Acting Men; Their Conservation Is Achieved By The Same Means That Brought Them Into Being. Independent Existence Marks The Work Of Art As A Product Of Making; Utter Dependence Upon Further Acts To Keep It In Existence Marks The State As A Product Of Action.

If This Practice [of Totalitarianism] Is Compared With […] [the Desert] Of Tyranny, It Seems As If A Way Had Been Found To Set The Desert Itself In Motion, To Let Loose A Sand Storm That Could Cover All Parts Of The Inhabited Earth. The Conditions Under Which We Exist Today In The Field Of Politics Are Indeed Threatened By These Devastating Sand Storms.

It Is A Secret From Nobody That The Famous Random Event Is Most Likely To Arise From Those Parts Of The World Where The Old Adage"there Is No Alternative To Victory" Retains A High Degree Of Plausibility.

Metaphysical Fallacies Contain The Only Clues We Have To What Thinking Means To Those Who Engage In It.

The Ideal Subject Of Totalitarian Rule Is Not The Convinced Nazi Or The Dedicated Communist, But People For Whom The Distinction Between Fact And Fiction, True And False, No Longer Exists.

Mathematics, The Non-empirical Science Par Excellence . . . The Science Of Sciences, Delivering The Key To Those Laws Of Nature And The Universe Which Are Concealed By Appearances.

Only The Hypocrite Is Really Rotten To The Core.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

The Saving Grace Of All Really Great Gifts Is That The Persons Who Bear Their Burden Remain Superior To What They Have Done, At Least As Long As The Source Of Creativity Is Alive.

It Is A Society Of Laborers Which Is About To Be Liberated From The Ferrets Of Labor, And This Society Does No Longer Know Of Those Other Higher And More Meaningful Activities For The Sake Of Which This Freedom Would Deserve To Be Won.

Culture Is Being Threatened When All Worldly Objects And Things, Produced By The Present Or The Past, Are Treated As Mere Functions For The Life Process Of Society, As Though They Are There Only To Fulfill Some Need, And For This Functionalization It Is Almost Irrelevant Whether The Needs In Question Are Of A High Or A Low Order.

The Most Radical Revolutionary Will Become A Conservative The Day After The Revolution.

Political Revolution

Revolutionary Leaders

This Inability To Think Created The Possibility For Many Ordinary Men To Commit Evil Deeds On A Gigantic Scale, The Like Of Which Had Never Been Seen Before. The Manifestation Of The Wind Of Thought Is Not Knowledge But The Ability To Tell Right From Wrong, Beautiful From Ugly. And I Hope That Thinking Gives People The Strength To Prevent Catastrophes In These Rare Moments When The Chips Are Down.

Walter Benjamin Knew That The Break In Tradition And Loss Of Authority Which Occurred In His Lifetime Were Irreparable, And He Concluded That He Had To Discover New Ways Of Dealing With The Past. In This He Became A Master When He Discovered That The Transmissibility Of The Past Had Been Replaced By The Citability And That In Place Of Its Authority There Had Arisen A Strange Power To Settle Down, Piecemeal, In The Present And To Deprive It Of ‘peace Of Mind,’ The Mindless Peace Of Complacency.

The Human Condition Is Such That Pain And Effort Are Not Just Symptoms Which Can Be Removed Without Changing Life Itself; They Are The Modes In Which Life Itself, Together With The Necessity To Which It Is Bound, Makes Itself Felt. For Mortals, The Easy Life Of The Gods Would Be A Lifeless Life.

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.

The Right To Marry Whoever One Wishes Is An Elementary Human Right ... Even Political Rights, Like The Right To Vote, And Nearly All Other Rights Enumerated In The Constitution, Are Secondary To The Inalienable Human Rights To 'life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness' Proclaimed In The Declaration Of Independence; And To This Category The Right To Home And Marriage Unquestionably Belongs.

Pursuit Of Happiness

In Addition To The Conditions Under Which Life Is Given To Man On Earth, And Partly Out Of Them, Men Constantly Create Their Own, Self-made Conditions, Which, Their Human Origins Notwithstanding, Possess The Same Conditioning Power As Natural Things. Whatever Touches Or Enters Into A Sustained Relationship With Human Life Immediately Assumes The Character Of A Condition Of Human Existence. This Is Why Men, No Matter What They Do, Are Always Conditioned Beings. Whatever Enters The Human World Of Its Own Accord Or Is Drawn Into It By Human Effort Becomes Part Of The Human Condition.

The History Of Humanity Is Not A Hotel Where Someone Can Rent A Room Whenever It Suits Him; Nor Is It A Vehicle Which We Board Or Get Out Of At Random. Our Past Will Be For Us A Burden Beneath Which We Can Only Collapse For As Long As We Refuse To Understand The Present And Fight For A Better Future. Only Then — But From That Moment On — Will The Burden Become A Blessing, That Is, A Weapon In The Battle For Freedom.

Rage Is By No Means An Automatic Reaction To Misery And Suffering As Such; No One Reacts With Rage To An Incurable Disease Or To An Earthquake Or, For That Matter, To Social Conditions That Seem To Be Unchangeable. Only Where There Is Reason To Suspect That Conditions Could Be Changed And Are Not Does Rage Arise.

Economic Growth May One Day Turn Out To Be A Curse Rather Than A Good, And Under No Conditions Can It Either Lead Into Freedom Or Constitute A Proof For Its Existence.

It Is The Nature Of Beginning That Something New Is Started Which Cannot Be Expected From Whatever May Have Happened Before. This Character Of Startling Unexpectedness Is Inherent In All Beginnings.

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

The Possible Redemption From The Predicament Of Irreversibility──of Being Unable To Undo What One Has Done──is The Faculty Of Forgiving. The Remedy For Unpredictability, For The Chaotic Uncertainty Of The Future, Is Contained In The Faculty To Make And Keep Promises. Both Faculties Depend Upon Plurality, On The Presence And Acting Of Others, For No Man Can Forgive Himself And No One Can Be Bound By A Promise Made Only To Himself.

The Aim Of Totalitarian Education Has Never Been To Instill Convictions But To Destroy The Capacity To Form Any.

The Concentration Camps, By Making Death Itself Anonymous (making It Impossible To Find Out Whether A Prisoner Is Dead Or Alive), Robbed Death Of Its Meaning As The End Of A Fulfilled Life. In A Sense They Took Away The Individual’s Own Death, Proving That Henceforth Nothing Belonged To Him And He Belonged To No One. His Death Merely Set A Seal On The Fact That He Had Never Existed.

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.

Thinking Does Not Lead To Truth; Truth Is The Beginning Of Thought.

[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.

Expulsion And Genocide, Though Both Are International Offenses, Must Remain Distinct; The Former Is An Offense Against Fellow-nations, Whereas The Latter Is An Attack Upon Human Diversity As Such, That Is, Upon A Characteristic Of The "human Status" Without Which The Very Words "mankind" Or "humanity" Would Be Devoid Of Meaning.

For The Possibilities Of Being Different From What One Is Are Infinite. Once One Has Negated Oneself, However, There Are No Longer Any Particular Choices.

Being Different

There Are Many Great Authors Of The Past Who Have Survived Centuries Of Oblivion And Neglect, But It Is Still An Open Question Whether They Will Be Able To Survive An Entertaining Version Of What They Have To Say.

Without Being Forgiven, Released From The Consequences Of What We Have Done, Our Capacity To Act Would, As It Were, Be Confined To One Single Deed From Which We Could Never Recover; We Would Remain The Victims Of Its Consequences Forever.

The Human Condition Comprehends More Than The Condition Under Which Life Has Been Given To Man. Men Are Conditioned Beings Because Everything They Come In Contact With Turns Immediately Into A Condition Of Their Existence. The World In Which The Vita Activa Spends Itself Consists Of Things Produced By Human Activities; But The Things That Owe Their Existence Exclusively To Men Nevertheless Constantly Condition Their Human Makers.

Basically We Are Always Educating For A World That Is Or Is Becoming Out Of Joint, For This Is The Basic Human Situation, In Which The World Is Created By Mortal Hands To Serve Mortals For A Limited Time As Home.

Power Can Be Thought Of As The Never-ending, Self-feeding Motor Of All Political Action That Corresponds To The Legendary Unending Accumulation Of Money That Begets Money.

... The Will Always Wills To Do Something And Thus Implicitly Holds In Contempt Sheer Thinking, Whose Whole Activity Depends On "doing Nothing.

We All Carry Fault Within.

... Whatever Men Do Or Know Or Experience Can Make Sense Only To The Extent That It Can Be Spoken About. There May Be Truths Beyond Speech, And They May Be Of Great Relevance To Man In The Singular, That Is, To Man In So Far As He Is Not A Political Being, Whatever Else He May Be. Men In The Plural, That Is, Men In So Far As They Live And Move And Act In This World, Can Experience Meaningfulness Only Because They Can Talk With And Make Sense To Each Other And To Themselves.

The Defiance Of Established Authority, Religious And Secular, Social And Political, As A World-wide Phenomenon May Well One Day Be Accounted The Outstanding Event Of The Last Decade.

These Are The Fifties, You Know. The Disgusting, Posturing Fifties.

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.

And The Distinction Between Violent And Non-violent Action Is That The Former Is Exclusively Bent Upon The Destruction Of The Old, And The Latter Is Chiefly Concerned With The Establishment Of Something New.

Action Painting Has To Do With Self-creation Or Self-definition Or Self-transcendence; But This Dissociates It From Self-expression, Which Assumes The Acceptance Of The Ego As It Is, With Its Wound And Its Magic.

Education Is The Point At Which We Decide Whether We Love The World Enough To Assume Responsibility For It And By The Same Token Save It From That Ruin Which, Except For Renewal, Except For The Coming Of The New And Young, Would Be Inevitable.

Thinking Beings Have An Urge To Speak, Speaking Beings Have An Urge To Think.

Every Organization Of Men, Be It Social Or Political, Ultimately Relies On Man's Capacity For Making Promises And Keeping Them.

It Is Indeed My Opinion Now That Evil Is Never “radical,” That It Is Only Extreme, And That It Possess Neither Depth Nor Any Demonic Dimension. It Can Overgrow And Lay Waste The Whole World Precisely Because It Spreads Like Fungus On The Surface. It Is “thought-defying,” As I Said, Because Thought Tries To Reach Some Depth, To Go To The Roots, And The Moment It Concerns Itself With Evil, It Is Frustrated Because There Is Nothing. That Is Its “banality.” Only The Good Has Depth And Can Be Radical.

There Is All The Difference In The World Between The Criminal's Avoiding The Public Eye And The Civil Disobedience's Taking The Law Into His Own Hands In Open Defiance. This Distinction Between An Open Violation Of The Law, Performed In Public, And A Clandestine One Is So Glaringly Obvious That It Can Be Neglected Only By Prejudice Or Ill Will.

... The Loss Of Belief In Future States Is Politically, Though Certainly Not Spiritually, The Most Significant Distinction Betweenour Present Period And The Centuries Before. And This Loss Is Definite. For No Matter How Religious Our World May Turn Again, Or How Much Authentic Faith Still Exists In It, Or How Deeply Our Moral Values May Be Rooted In Our Religious Systems, The Fear Of Hell Is No Longer Among The Motives Which Would Prevent Or Stimulate The Actions Of A Majority.

Kierkegaard, Marx, And Nietzsche Are For Us Like Guideposts To A Past Which Has Lost Its Significance.

According To Bourgeois Standards, Those Who Are Completely Unlucky And Unsuccessful Are Automatically Barred From Competition, Which Is The Life Of Society. Good Fortune Is Identified With Honor, And Bad Luck With Shame.

What Is The Subject Of Our Thought? Experience! Nothing Else!

Ideas, As Distinguished From Events, Are Never Unprecedented.

Since One Cannot Educate Adults, The Word "education" Has An Evil Sound In Politics; There Is A Pretense Of Education, When The Real Purpose Is Coercion Without The Use Of Force.

Evil Thrives On Apathy And Cannot Exist Without It.

I Know Exactly What I Want To Write. I Do Not Write Until I Do. Usually I Write It All Down Only Once. And That Goes Relatively Quickly, Since It Really Depends Only On How Fast I Type.

The More Dubious And Uncertain An Instrument Violence Has Become In International Relations, The More It Has Gained In Reputation And Appeal In Domestic Affairs, Specifically In The Matter Of Revolution.

Kant ... Discovered "the Scandal Of Reason," That Is The Fact That Our Mind Is Not Capable Of Certain And Verifiable Knowledge Regarding Matters And Questions That It Nevertheless Cannot Help Thinking About.

The Blessing Of Life As A Wholecan Never Be Found In Work.

Violence Can Always Destroy Power; Out Of The Barrel Of A Gun Grows The Most Effective Command, Resulting In The Most Instant And Perfect Obedience. What Never Can Grow Out Of It Is Power.

There Always Comes A Point Beyond Which Lying Becomes Counterproductive. This Point Is Reached When The Audience To Which The Lies Are Addressed Is Forced To Disregard Altogether The Distinguishing Line Between Truth And Falsehood In Order To Be Able To Survive.

The Individual Who Has Been Liberated By Reason Is Always Running Head-on Into A World, A Society, Whose Past In The Shape Of 'prejudices' Has A Great Deal Of Power; He Is Forced To Learn That Past Reality Is Also A Reality.

It Is In The Nature Of All Party Systems That The Authentically Political Talents Can Assert Themselves Only In Rare Cases, And It Is Even Rarer That The Specifically Political Qualifications Survive The Petty Maneuvers Of Party Politics With Its Demands For Plain Salesmanship.

... We May Remember What The Romansthought A Cultivated Person Ought To Be: One Who Knows How To Choose His Company Among Men, Among Things, Among Thoughts, In The Present As Well As In The Past.

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John Charles Polanyi

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