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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.

-Hannah Arendt

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Jefferson, Though The Secret

Hannah Arendt

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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.

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

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.

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

Every Thought Is An Afterthought.

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

Legitimacy, When Challenged, Bases Itself On An Appeal To The Past, While Justification Relates To An End That Lies In The Future. Violence Can Be Justifiable, But It Never Will Be Legitimate.

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.

It Is Rather Hard And Certainly Depressing To Admit Guilt And To Repent

There Are No Dangerous Thoughts; Thinking Itself Is Dangerous.

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.

If It Is True ... That No One Has A Life Worth Thinking About Whose Life Story Cannot Be Told, Does It Not Then Follow That Life Could Be, Even Ought To Be, Lived As A Story, That What One Has To Do In Life Is To Make The Story Come True?

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.

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

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.

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

Generally Speaking, Violence Always Arises Out Of Impotence. It Is The Hope Of Those Who Have No Power.

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 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.

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.

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.

Men, Forever Tempted To Lift The Veil Of The Future-with The Aid Of Computers Or Horoscopes Or The Intestines Of Sacrificial Animals-have A Worse Record To Show In These Sciences Than In Almost Any Scientific Endeavor.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It Is Better To Suffer Wrong Than To Do Wrong, Because You Can Remain The Friend Of The Sufferer; Who Would Want To Be The Friend Of And Have To Live Together With A Murderer? Not Even Another Murderer.

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

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

Exactly For The Sake Of What Is New And Revolutionary In Every Child, Education Must Be Conservative; It Must Preserve This Newness And Introduce It As A New Thing Into An Old World.

If The World Is To Contain A Public Space, It Cannot Be Erected For One Generation And Planned For The Living Only; It Must Transcend The Life-span Of Mortal Men…. There Is Perhaps No Clearer Testimony To The Loss Of The Public Realm In The Modern Age Than The Almost Complete Loss Of Authentic Concern With Immortality, A Loss Somewhat Overshadowed By The Simultaneous Loss Of The Metaphysical Concern With Eternity.

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 Excellence, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

Courage Is Indispensible Because In Politics Not Life But The World Is At Stake.

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.

Every End In History Necessarily Contains A New Beginning.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For The Lesson Of Such Stories [of Resistance To Nazi Atrocities] Is Simple And Within Everybody's Grasp. Politically Speaking, It Is That Under Conditions Of Terror, Most People Will Comply But Some People Will Not, Just As The Lesson Of The Countries To Which The Final Solution Was Proposed Is That "it Could Happen" In Most Places But It Did Not Happen Everywhere. Humanly Speaking, No More Is Required, And No More Can Reasonably Be Asked, For This Planet To Remain A Place Fit For Human Habitation.

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

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?

Even In The Darkest Of Times We Have The Right To Expect Some Illumination, And ... Such Illumination May Well Come Less From Theories And Concepts Than From The Uncertain, Flickering, And Often Weak Light That Some Men And Women, In Their Lives And Their Works, Will Kindle Under Almost All Circumstances And Shed Over The Time-span That Was Given Them On Earth.

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.

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

Thinking Withdraws Radically And For Its Own Sake From This World And Its Evidential Nature, Whereas Science Profits From A Possible Withdrawal For The Sake Of Specific Results.

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.

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.

Opinions Are Formed In A Process Of Open Discussion And Public Debate, And Where No Opportunity For The Forming Of Opinions Exists, There May Be Moods -moods Of The Masses And Moods Of Individuals, The Latter No Less Fickle And Unreliable Than The Former -but No Opinion.

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

Could The Activity Of Thinking As Such, The Habit Of Examining Whatever Happens To Come To Pass Or To Attract Attention, Regardless Of Results And Specific Content, Could This Activity Be Among The Conditions That Make Men Abstain From Evil-doing?

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.

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

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

Individual Strength

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.

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.

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.

We All Carry Fault Within.

When We Were Told That By Freedom We Understood Free Enterprise, We Did Very Little To Dispel This Monstrous Falsehood. Wealth And Economic Well-being, We Have Asserted, Are The Fruits Of Freedom, While We Should Have Been The First To Know That This Kind Of Happiness Has Been An Unmixed Blessing Only In This Country, And It Is A Minor Blessing Compared With The Truly Political Freedoms, Such As Freedom Of Speech And Thought, Of Assembly And Association, Even Under The Best Conditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Fateful Equating Of Power With Violence, Of The Political With Government, And Of Government With A Necessary Evil Has Begun.

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

Fear Is An Emotion Indispensable For Survival.

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.

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

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

As Witnesses Not Of Our Intentions But Of Our Conduct, We Can Be True Or False, And The Hypocrite's Crime Is That He Bears False Witness Against Himself. What Makes It So Plausible To Assume That Hypocrisy Is The Vice Of Vices Is That Integrity Can Indeed Exist Under The Cover Of All Other Vices Except This One. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Equality...is The Result Of Human Organization. We Are Not Born Equal.

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.

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

The End Of Rebellion Is Liberation, While The End Of Revolution Is The Foundation Of Freedom.

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.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

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.

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.

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 Trouble With Eichmann Was Precisely That So Many Were Like Him, And That The Many Were Neither Perverted Nor Sadistic, That They Were, And Still Are, Terribly And Terrifyingly Normal. From The Viewpoint Of Our Legal Institutions And Of Our Moral Standards Of Judgment, This Normality Was Much More Terrifying Than All The Atrocities Put Together.

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.

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.

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

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.

Man's Chief Moral Deficiency Appears To Be Not His Indiscretions But His Reticence.

Men Always Want To Be Terribly Influential, But I See That As Somewhat External. Do I Imagine Myself Being Influential? No. I Want To Understand. And If Others Understand--in The Same Sense That I Have Understood--that Gives Me A Sense Of Satisfaction, Like Feeling At Home.

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.

Bureaucracy, The Rule Of Nobody.

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

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

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

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.

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

Men In Plural […] Can Experience Meaningfulness Only Because They Can Talk With And Make Sense To Each Other And Themselves.

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

Changing The World

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.

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

It Is Quite Gratifying To Feel Guilty If You Haven't Done Anything Wrong: How Noble! Whereas It Is Rather Hard And Certainly Depressing To Admit Guilt And To Repent.

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.

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.

They Must Remember That They Are Constantly On The Run, And That The World's Reality Is Actually Expressed By Their Escape.

Ideas, As Distinguished From Events, Are Never Unprecedented.

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.

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

Political Revolution

Revolutionary Leaders

To Act, In Its Most General Sense, Means To Take An Initiative, To Begin... To Set Something Into Motion.

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.

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.

Lacking The Truth, [we] Will However Finds Instants Of Truth, And These Instants Are In Fact All We Have Available To Us To Give Some Order To This Chaos Of Horror.

Conscience Is The Anticipation Of The Fellow Who Awaits You If And When You Come Home.

The Earth Is The Very Quintessence Of The Human Condition.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Our Problem Today Is Not How To Expropriate The Expropriators But, Rather, How To Arrange Matters So That The Masses, Dispossessed By Industrial Society In Capitalist And Socialist Systems, Can Regain Property. For This Reason Alone, The Alternative Between Capitalism And Socialism Is False-not Only Because Neither Exists Anywhere In Its Pure State Anyhow, But Because We Have Here Twins, Each Wearing Different Hats.

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

There Is No Lasting Happiness Outside The Prescribed Cycle Of Painful Exhaustion And Pleasurable Regeneration, And Whatever Throws This Cycle Out Of Balance – Poverty And Misery Where Exhaustion Is Followed By Wretchedness Instead Of Regeneration, Or Great Riches And An Entirely Effortless Life Where Boredom Takes The Place Of Exhaustion And Where The Mills Of Necessity, Of Consumption And Digestion, Grind An Impotent Human Body Mercilessly And Barrenly To Death – Ruins The Elemental Happiness That Comes From Being Alive.

Lasting Happiness

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

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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 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.

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

Revolutionaries Do Not Make Revolutions. The Revolutionaries Are Those Who Know When Power Is Lying In The Street And Then They Can Pick It Up.

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

When An Old Truth Ceases To Be Applicable, It Does Not Become Any Truer By Being Stood On Its Head.

The Concept Of Unlimited Expansion That Alone Can Fulfill The Hope For Unlimited Accumulation Of Capital, And Brings About The Aimless Accumulation Of Power, Makes The Foundation Of New Political Bodies - Which Up To The Era Of Imperialism Always Had Been The Upshot Of Conquest - Well-nigh Impossible.

Wherever The Relevance Of Speech Is At Stake, Matters Become Political By Definition, For Speech Is What Makes Man A Political Being.

The Practice Of Violence, Like All Action, Changes The World, But The Most Probable Change Is A More Violent World.

Only The Hypocrite Is Really Rotten To The Core.

We Have Almost Succeeded In Leveling All Human Activities To The Common Denominator Of Securing The Necessities Of Life And Providing For Their Abundance.

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.

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.

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

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.

Death Not Merely Ends Life, It Also Bestows Upon It A Silent Completeness, Snatched From The Hazardous Flux To Which All Things Human Are Subject.

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.

When We Think Of A Criminal, We Imagine Someone With Criminal Motives. And When We Look At Eichmann, He Doesn't Actually Have Any Criminal Motives. Not What Is Usually Understood By "criminal Motives." He Wanted To Go Along With The Rest. He Wanted To Say "we," And Going-along-with-the-rest And Wanting-to-say-we Like This Were Quite Enough To Make The Greatest Of All Crimes Possible. The Hitlers, After All, Really Aren't The Ones Who Are Typical In This Kind Of Situation--they'd Be Powerless Without The Support Of Others.

... We Have Almost Succeeded In Leveling All Human Activities To The Common Denominator Of Securing The Necessities Of Life And Providing For Their Bundance. Whatever We Do, We Are Supposed To Do For The Sake Of "making A Living;" Such Is The Verdict Of Society, And The Number Of People, Especially In The Professions Who Might Challenge It, Has Decreased Rapidly. The Only Exception Society Is Willing To Grant Is To The Artist, Who, Strictly Speaking, Is The Only "worker" Left In A Laboring Society.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Friendship Love

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

What Really Distinguishes This Generation In All Countries From Earlier Generations ... Is Its Determination To Act, Its Joy In Action, The Assurance Of Being Able To Change Things By One's Own Efforts.

Politically Speaking, Tribal Nationalism [patriotism] Always Insists That Its Own People Are Surrounded By 'a World Of Enemies' - 'one Against All' - And That A Fundamental Difference Exists Between This People And All Others. It Claims Its People To Be Unique, Individual, Incompatible With All Others, And Denies Theoretically The Very Possibility Of A Common Mankind Long Before It Is Used To Destroy The Humanity Of Man.

Few Girls Are As Well Shaped As A Good Horse.

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.

Scientific And Philosophic Truth Have Parted Company.

Evil Thrives On Apathy And Cannot Exist Without It.

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.

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.

Nietzsche ... Has Caused [philosophers] So Much Confusion.

Under Conditions Of Tyranny It Is Far Easier To Act Than To Think.

Of All Human Activities, Only Labor, And Neither Action Nor Work, Is Unending, Progressing Automatically In Accordance With Life Itself And Outside The Range Of Willful Decisions Or Humanly Meaningful Purposes.

The Role Played By Education In All Political Utopias From Ancient Times Onward Shows How Natural It Seems To Start A New World With Those Who Are By Birth And Nature New. So Far As Politics Is Concerned, This Involves Of Course A Serious Misconception: Instead Of Joining With One's Equals In Assuming The Effort Of Persuasion And Running The Risk Of Failure, There Is Dictatorial Intervention, Based Upon The Absolute Superiority Of The Adult, And The Attempt To Produce The New As A Fait Accompli, That Is, As Though The New Already Existed.

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

The Insight That Peace Is The End Of War, And That Therefore A War Is The Preparation For Peace, Is At Least As Old As Aristotle, And The Pretense That The Aim Of An Armament Race Is To Guard The Peace Is Even Older, Namely As Old As The Discovery Of Propaganda Lies.

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

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

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

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.

A Functionary, When He Really Is Nothing More Than A Functionary, Is Really A Very Dangerous Gentleman.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Only Grandeur Of Imperialism Lies In The Nation's Losing Battle Against It.

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.

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.

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