There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
HANNAH ARENDTWhen an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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Beginning, 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.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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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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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
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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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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.
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The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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.
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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.
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The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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