"Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

Fiction Reality TRUE False

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About Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German-born political theorist and historian known for her analyses of totalitarianism, authority, and modern political life. Born in 1906, she became one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century through works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. She died in New York on 1975-12-04.

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