Quotes from Hannah Arendt

As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution. He did

The feeling is that we are trying to impose some U.S. image on distant peoples we cannot understand . . . and we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths," as McNaughton wrote in 1967.

This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.

both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.86

George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Johnson administration and the only adviser who dared to break the taboo and recommend immediate withdrawal, had the courage to tell the President in 1965).

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.

the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.

Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. (Robert H. Jackson, Justice at Nuremberg)

The social resentment of the lower middle classes against the Jews turned into a highly explosive political element, because these bitterly hated Jews were thought to be well on their way to political power.

The greatest revolutionary innovation, Madison's discovery of the federal principle for the foundation of large republics

The irregularities and abnormalities of the trial in Jerusalem were so many, so varied, and of such legal complexity that they overshadowed during the trial, as they have in the surprisingly small amount of post-trial literature, the central moral, political, and even legal problems that the trial inevitably posed.

There may have been something identical about the way she fell prey to fear and to longing, namely, the act of falling prey to something, of being trapped in a craving--that fixation on a single thing, when the empty gaze forgets multiplicity or, taken over by craving and passion, considers nothing else. But that longing may also have opened up empires for her, strange, colorful empires she was at home in and could love with the living bliss that never changes.

no one at the top knew or considered it important that the Vietnamese had been fighting foreign invaders for almost 2,000 years,"63 or that the notion of Vietnam as a "tiny backward nation" without interest to "civilized" nations, which is, unhappily, often shared by the war critics, stands in flagrant contradiction to the very old and highly developed culture of the region.

Another argument against extradition, offered by the observers the West German government sent to Jerusalem, was that Germany had abolished capital punishment and hence was unable to mete out the sentence Eichmann deserved. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi mass murderers, it is difficult not to suspect bad faith in this objection.

The law according to which this process developed was simple: each class of society which came into a conflict with the state as such became anti-semitic because the only social group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews.

The happiness achieved in isolation from the world and enjoyed within the confines of one's own private existence can never be anything but the famous "absence of pain," a definition on which all variations of consistent sensualism must agree.

Public admiration, too, is something to be used and consumed, and status, as we would say today, fulfils one need as food fulfils another: public admiration is consumed by individual vanity as food is consumed by hunger.

Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein.

the concept of happiness is present in us through a consciousness that is equated with memory (that is, since happiness is not an "innate" but a remembered idea), this "outside the human condition" actually means before human existence.

The critic as an alchemist practicing the obscure art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, enduring gold of truth

Image-making as global policy—not world conquest, but victory in the battle "to win the people's minds"—is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human

Behind the constantly repeated cliché of the "mightiest power on earth," there lurked the dangerous myth of omnipotence.

The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.

atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously.