The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDTThe greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDTThe aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDTThe third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
HANNAH ARENDTThe 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 ARENDTAnd the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
HANNAH ARENDTAnd if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
HANNAH ARENDTThere is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
HANNAH ARENDTThe antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
HANNAH ARENDTRevolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
HANNAH ARENDTUnder the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
HANNAH ARENDTGood works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
HANNAH ARENDTBeginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
HANNAH ARENDTSlavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
HANNAH ARENDTThere 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.
HANNAH ARENDTEvil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDTIt was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
HANNAH ARENDT