It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
-
-
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
HANNAH ARENDT -
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 -
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
HANNAH ARENDT -
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
HANNAH ARENDT -
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 dehumanize them.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Evil comes from a failure to think.
HANNAH ARENDT