Hannah Arendt quotes - page 4

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. (Hannah Arendt)
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. View quote
Hannah Arendt
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. View quote
Hannah Arendt
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Men in plural [...] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject. View quote
Hannah Arendt
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. View quote
Hannah Arendt
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. View quote
Hannah Arendt
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. View quote
Hannah Arendt
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. View quote
Hannah Arendt
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties. (Hannah Arendt)
Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Hitler never intended to defend ‘the West' against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds' for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia. View quote
Hannah Arendt
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, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. View quote
Hannah Arendt
It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution. View quote
Hannah Arendt
In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death. View quote
Hannah Arendt
The only man for whom Hitler had ‘unqualified respect' was ‘Stalin the genius', and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not... have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler. View quote
Hannah Arendt
If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic "inside we are all alike,” just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. [...] The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body. View quote
Hannah Arendt
The Nazis were ‘convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,' Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proven time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics. (Hannah Arendt)
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances. View quote
Hannah Arendt
The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven." View quote
Hannah Arendt
[...]the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts. View quote
Hannah Arendt
The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses-not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries. View quote
Hannah Arendt