What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
HANNAH ARENDTIn the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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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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But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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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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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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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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