The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
HANNAH ARENDTThe only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
HANNAH ARENDTThe aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDTUnder the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
HANNAH ARENDTIt 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.
HANNAH ARENDTOnly 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.
HANNAH ARENDTThe curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.
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.
HANNAH ARENDTOnly the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
HANNAH ARENDTNo punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
HANNAH ARENDTMen in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
HANNAH ARENDTStorytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
HANNAH ARENDTIt 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.
HANNAH ARENDTForgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
HANNAH ARENDTAs citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDTThe greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
HANNAH ARENDTThe 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 ARENDT