Hannah Arendt,
What is History?, "Between Past and Future", pg.87-88: "...but we can take almost any hypothesis and
act upon it, with a sequence of results in reality which not only make sense but
work. This means quiet literally that everything is possible not only in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself.
In my studies of totalitarianism I tried to show that the totalitarian phenomenon, with its striking anti-utilitarian traits and its stange disregard for factuality, is based in the last analysis on the conviction that everything is possible- and not just permitted, morally or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilisim. The totalitarian systems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis and that, in the course of consistently guided action, the particular hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality. The assumption which underlies consistent action can be as mad as it pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then "objectively" true. What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in the course of consistent action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved. In other words the axiom from which the deduction is started does not need to be, as traditional metaphysics and logic supposed, a self-evident truth; it does not have to tally at all with the facts as given in the objective world at the moment the action starts; the process of action, if it is consistent, will proceed to create a world in which the assumption becomes axiomatic and self-evident."