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Hannah Arendt
68 quotes
“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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 (1906–1975) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Revolution (1963), ch. 2
“Kein Mensch hat das Recht zu gehorchen.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paradoxical aphorism asserting the responsibility of everyone to engage in critical thinking in response to unjustly oppressive commands or demands against rationality or humanity, implying automatic obedience to tyrann…
“Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Men in Dark Times (1968)
“In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Violence (1970)
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Yorker (12 September 1970)
“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books (1974)
“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking
“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 114
“I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speaking of her book The Human Condition, as quoted in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, p. xxiv
“The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294
“The phenomenon of the will [in Epictetus ] [...] a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it commands nothing but our ability to think. The goal is to annihilate reality insofar it concerns me.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[N]o matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, at least for ourselves, contain as in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 (2018)
“In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Real power begins where secrecy begins.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16
“It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Human Condition (1958)
“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not murder which is forgiven but the killer, his person as it appears in circumstances and intentions. The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If [...] the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kant ... discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kant stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge. . . to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[…]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.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source