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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.

-Hannah Arendt

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There Are No Parallels

Hannah Arendt

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas, As Distinguished From Events, Are Never Unprecedented.

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

Entirely New Concepts Are Very Rare In Politics.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Every End In History Necessarily Contains A New Beginning.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Changing The World

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

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.

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.

Where Everybody Is Guilty, Nobody Is.

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

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

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

While Strength Is The Natural Quality Of An Individual Seen In Isolation, Power Springs Up Between Men When They Act Together And Vanishes The Moment They Disperse.

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.

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.

Fear Is An Emotion Indispensable For Survival.

... 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

For Excellence, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

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

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.

Violence Is An Expression Of Impotence.

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

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.

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.

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.

We All Carry Fault Within.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Political Revolution

Revolutionary Leaders

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

Bureaucracy, The Rule Of Nobody.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Evil Thrives On Apathy And Cannot Exist Without It.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've Begun So Late, Really Only In Recent Years, To Truly Love The World... Out Of Gratitude, I Want To Call My Book On Political Theories Amor Mundi .

The 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.

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

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There Are No Dangerous Thoughts; Thinking Itself Is Dangerous.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 Earth Is The Very Quintessence Of The Human Condition.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Thought And Action Must Never Part Company.

Thoughts And Actions

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

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

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

... 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.

[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.

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.

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

Friendship Love

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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