"Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
― Hannah Arendt
|
"Men in plural can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves."
― Hannah Arendt |
"Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time."
― Hannah Arendt |
"Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake."
― Hannah Arendt |
"The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans."
― Hannah Arendt |
"The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness."
― Hannah Arendt
|
"For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same."
― Hannah Arendt
|
"The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead."
― Hannah Arendt
|
|
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
― Hannah Arendt |
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
― 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."
― Hannah Arendt |
"Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ..."
― Hannah Arendt
|
"Half of politics is "image-making", the other half is the art of making people believe the image."
― Hannah Arendt |
"To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent."
― Hannah Arendt
|
"One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."
― Hannah Arendt |
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
― Hannah Arendt
|
|
"When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing."
― Hannah Arendt |
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."
― Hannah Arendt |
"Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces."
― 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 power's disappearance."
― Hannah Arendt |
"In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm."
― Hannah Arendt |
"The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility."
― Hannah Arendt
|
"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."
― Hannah Arendt
|
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
― Hannah Arendt
|
|
