Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDTThe essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Men in plural, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
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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 politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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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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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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Evil comes from a failure to think.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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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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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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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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