The 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 ARENDTRevolutionaries 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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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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For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
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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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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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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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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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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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Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.
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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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The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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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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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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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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No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
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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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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.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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