Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
HANNAH ARENDTWhat are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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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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We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.
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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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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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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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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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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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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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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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Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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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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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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