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. – Hannah Arendt
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. – Hannah Arendt
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 powers disappearance. – Hannah Arendt
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. – Hannah Arendt
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid. – Denis Diderot