The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDTThe language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.
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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
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There 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.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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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.
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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.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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.
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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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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.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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There 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.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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