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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.

-Hannah Arendt

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Slavery's Crime Against Humanity

Hannah Arendt

...

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.

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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 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.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Individual Strength

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

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

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.

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.

Every Thought Is Strictly Speaking An After-thought.

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

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

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

To Be Sure, Nothing Is More Important To The Integrity Of The Universities . . . Than A Rigorously Enforced Divorce From War-oriented Research And All Connected Enterprises.

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

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.

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.

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

What I Cannot Live With May Not Bother Another Man's Conscience. The Result Is That Conscience Will Stand Against Conscience.

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.

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

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.

Action Without A Name, A Who Attached To It, Is Meaningless.

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.

Only The Hypocrite Is Really Rotten To The Core.

Legends Have Always Played A Powerful Role In The Making Of History. ... Without Ever Relating Facts Reliably, Yet Always Expressing Their True Significance, They Offered A Truth Beyond Realities, A Remembrance Beyond Memories.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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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.

Promises Are The Uniquely Human Way Of Ordering The Future.

Keeping Promises

Broken Promises

Where All Are Guilty, No One Is; Confessions Of Collective Guilt Are The Best Possible Safeguard Against The Discovery Of Culprits, And The Very Magnitude Of The Crime The Best Excuse For Doing Nothing.

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

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

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.

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.

Every Thought Is An Afterthought.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In Contrast To Revenge, Which Is The Natural, Automatic Reaction To Transgression And Which, Because Of The Irreversibility Of The Action Process Can Be Expected And Even Calculated, The Act Of Forgiving Can Never Be Predicted; It Is The Only Reaction That Acts In An Unexpected Way And Thus Retains, Though Being A Reaction, Something Of The Original Character Of Action.

We Are Wont To See Friendship Solely As A Phenomenon Of Intimacy In Which The Friends Open Their Hearts To Each Other Unmolested By The World And Its Demands...thus It Is Hard For Us To Understand The Political Relevance Of Friendship...but For The Greeks The Essence Of Friendship Consisted In Discourse...the Converse (in Contrast To The Intimate Talk In Which Individuals Speak About Themselves), Permeated Though It May Be By Pleasure In The Friend’s Presence, Is Concerned With The Common World.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every Political Structure, New Or Old, Left To Itself Develops Stabilizing Forces Which Stand In The Way Of Constant Transformation And Expansion. Therefore All Political Bodies Appear To Be Temporary Obstacles When They Are Seen As Part Of An Eternal Stream Of Growing Power.

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

In Politics, Love Is A Stranger, And When It Intrudes Upon It Nothing Is Being Achieved Except Hypocrisy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Political Revolution

Revolutionary Leaders

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.

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

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.

The Heritage Of The American Revolution Is Forgotten, And The American Government, For Better And For Worse, Has Entered Into Theheritage Of Europe As Though It Were Its Patrimony--unaware, Alas, Of The Fact That Europe's Declining Power Was Preceded And Accompanied By Political Bankruptcy, The Bankruptcy Of The Nation-state And Its Concept Of Sovereignty.

Thought And Action Must Never Part Company.

Thoughts And Actions

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.

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.

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.

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

Few Girls Are As Well Shaped As A Good Horse.

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

Bureaucracy, The Rule Of Nobody.

... 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.

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

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.

Violence Is An Expression Of Impotence.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

Factual Truth Is Always Related To Other People: It Concerns Events And Circumstances In Which Many Are Involved; It Is Established By Witnesses And Depends Upon Testimony; It Exists Only To The Extent That It Is Spoken About, Even If It Occurs In The Domain Of Privacy. It Is Political By Nature.

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.

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

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.

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.

It Is In The Very Nature Of A Beginning To Carry With Itself A Measure Of Complete Arbitrariness. Not Only Is It Not Bound Into A Reliable Chain Of Cause And Effect, A Chain In Which Each Effect Immediately Turns Into The Cause For Future Developments, The Beginning Has, As It Were, Nothing Whatever To Hold On To; It Is As Though It Came Out Of Nowhere In Either Time Or Space.

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

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

Friendship Love

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Without Being Bound To The Fulfillment Of Promises, We Would Never Be Able To Keep Our Identities; We Would Be Condemned To Wanderhelplessly And Without Direction In The Darkness Of Each Man's Lonely Heart, Caught In Its Contradictions And Equivocalities--a Darkness Which Only The Light Shed Over The Public Realm Through The Presence Of Others, Who Confirm The Identity Between The One Who Promises And The One Who Fulfills, Can Dispel.

Where Everybody Is Guilty, Nobody Is.

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

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.

Entirely New Concepts Are Very Rare In Politics.

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 .

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.

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.

There Are No Dangerous Thoughts; Thinking Itself Is Dangerous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Promises Are The Uniquely Human Way Of Ordering The Future, Making It Predictable And Reliable To The Extent That This Is Humanly Possible.

Keeping Promises

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.

Power Is Actualized Only When Word And Deed Have Not Parted Company.

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

The Sad Truth Is That Most Evil Is Done By People Who Never Make Up Their Minds To Be Good Or Evil.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If We Don't Know Our Own History, We Are Deemed To Live It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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