To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity.
HANNAH ARENDTIf 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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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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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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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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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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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.
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A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.
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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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