And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDTThe only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
-
-
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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 -
Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
HANNAH ARENDT -
If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDT -
It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
HANNAH ARENDT -
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Evil comes from a failure to think.
HANNAH ARENDT -
There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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 -
What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
HANNAH ARENDT -
If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDT