Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
HANNAH ARENDTEvery generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
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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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The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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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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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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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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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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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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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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