Quotes from Hannah Arendt

The simultaneous decline of the European nation-state and growth of antisemitic movements, the coincident downfall of nationally organized Europe and the extermination of Jews, which was prepared for by the victory of antisemitism over all competing isms in the preceding struggle for persuasion of public opinion, have to be taken as a serious indication of the source of antisemitism. Modern

If, in the final stage of disintegration, antisemitic slogans proved the most effective means of inspiring and organizing great masses of people for imperialist expansion and destruction of the old forms of government, then the previous history of the relationship between Jews and the state must contain elementary clues to the growing hostility between certain groups of society and the Jews. We

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.

Because of their close relationship to state sources of power, the Jews were invariably identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and concentration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably suspected of working for the destruction of all social structures.

Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an "experienced minority" which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from "the inexperienced majority

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom...and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

Fluindo na direcção da morte, a vida do homem arrastaria consigo, inevitavelmente, todas as coisas humanas para a ruína e a destruição, se não fosse a faculdade humana de interrompê-las e iniciar algo novo, faculdade inerente à acção como perene advertência de que os homens, embora devam morrer, não nascem para morrer, mas para começar.

The more effective the chauvinistic propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments of violence.

Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capitals, the Nazis were confident that their best "propaganda" would be their racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and broken promises, they had never swerved for expediency's sake.

Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

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.

Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the National Security Managers, as they have been recently called by Richard Barnet, who exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and interpreting the outside world for him.

Liberties in the sense of civil rights are the results of liberation, but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, whose essence is admission to the public realm and participation in public affairs.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Wherever men, women, or children are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low…ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected by the people about him and within his knowledge.

all the countries that had not been able to help themselves to begin with—like Japan—are poorer, further away from either economic or political stability than ever.

None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.

The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.

For the oath taken by the members of the S.S. differed from the military oath sworn by the soldiers in that it bound them only to Hitler, not to Germany.

Het Smolensk-archief heeft duidelijk gemaakt in welke mate elk onderzoek van deze periode uit de Russische geschiedenis blijvend gehinderd zal worden door het ontbreken van de meest elementaire documenten en statistieken. [...]Kortom, we leren niets uit de organisatiestructuur van het regime, terwijl we daar in het geval van nazi-Duitsland zeer goed over geïnformeerd zijn.

I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy knowledgeable intimacy of friendships concluded in one's youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with one another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends.

In a sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow convinced them that the state's means of violence had to be used exclusively for protection of business interests and national property.

In his] mind, there was no contradiction between I will jump into my grave laughing, appropriate for the end of the war, and I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth, which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same function of giving him a lift.