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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.

-Hannah Arendt

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The Concept Of Unlimited

Hannah Arendt

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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.

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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.

Bureaucracy, The Rule Of Nobody.

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

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.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fear Is An Emotion Indispensable For Survival.

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Friendship Love

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.

... 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.

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

We All Carry Fault Within.

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

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

Nobody Is The Author Or Producer Of His Own Life Story ... Somebody Began It And Is Its Subject In The Twofold Sense, Namely, Its Actor And Sufferer ... But Nobody Is The Author.

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.

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.

Violence Is An Expression Of Impotence.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Only The Hypocrite Is Really Rotten To The Core.

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?

Thought ... Is Still Possible, And No Doubt Actual, Wherever Men Live Under The Conditions Of Political Freedom. Unfortunately ... No Other Human Capacity Is So Vulnerable, And It Is In Fact Far Easier To Act Under Conditions Of Tyranny Than It Is To Think.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Changing The World

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 .

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

For Excellence, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

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.

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

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

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

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.

[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.

There Is A Strange Interdependence Between Thoughtlessness And Evil.

Interdependence

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.

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

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

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 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.

Scientific And Philosophic Truth Have Parted Company.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Where Everybody Is Guilty, Nobody Is.

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.

Entirely New Concepts Are Very Rare In Politics.

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.

Thought And Action Must Never Part Company.

Thoughts And Actions

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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 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.

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

Evil Thrives On Apathy And Cannot Exist Without It.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Few Girls Are As Well Shaped As A Good Horse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

If The Ability To Tell Right From Wrong Should Have Anything To Do With The Ability To Think, Then We Must Be Able To 'demand' Its Exercise In Every Sane Person No Matter How Erudite Or Ignorant.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Conflict Between Art And Politics... Cannot And Must Not Be Solved.

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

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 Good Things In History Are Usually Of Very Short Duration, But Afterward Have A Decisive Influence On What Happens Over Long Periods Of Time.

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.

Every Thought Is An Afterthought.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ideas, As Distinguished From Events, Are Never Unprecedented.

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

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

The Earth Is The Very Quintessence Of The Human Condition.

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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Theodore Roosevelt

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