The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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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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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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It 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.
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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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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.
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Good 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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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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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