Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
HANNAH ARENDTComprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
-
-
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.
HANNAH ARENDT -
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.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
HANNAH ARENDT -
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.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identified with man’s freedom. ‘That a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
HANNAH ARENDT -
In 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.
HANNAH ARENDT -
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.
HANNAH ARENDT -
The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them children.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Evil comes from a failure to think.
HANNAH ARENDT -
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
HANNAH ARENDT