Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom–a fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). 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. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society–more than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity. . Hannah Arendt
We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that...
-
C. Joybell C.
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
-
Mother Teresa
Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.
-
Roy T. Bennett
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
-
Dalai Lama Xiv
More Quotes By Hannah Arendt
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.
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an...
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
The world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in-between — much more than (as is often thought) men or even man — is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious...
