Quotes from Hannah Arendt

2) Bolshevism is understood in religious terms. "What believers of traditional religions ascribe to God Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Bolsheviks ascribe to the allegedly scientific laws of social development." (This quid pro quo of God and historical law has by now apparently convinced everybody who believes that neither the existence of God nor that of historical laws can be demonstrated scientifically.)

The fermenta cognitionis which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.

There is an abyss between the men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds and active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge.

The happy life is not recalled as past, pure and simple, without further relevance for the present. Insofar as the happy life is remembered, it is part and parcel of the present and inspires our desires and expectations for the future. The point about remembering joy when we are sad is that we hope for its eventual return, just as in remembering it while in a state of joy we actually fear that sadness may come back.

With the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free, Penguin Books, 2020.

Nothing expressed in words can ever attain to the immobility of an object of contemplation. Compared to the latter, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it slips away.

Desire is truly directed toward a transcendent, transmundane future because it rests ultimately on the desire for an everlasting happy life.

You ask about the effect my work has on others. If I may speak ironically, that's a masculine question. Men always want to be influential. I see that somewhat as an onlooker. Do I see myself as influential? No, I want to understand. If others understand in the same way I've understood that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like being among equals.

Augustine arrives at "the camps and vast palaces of memory."11 There he finds the notion of the "happy life," which is his origin and as such the quintessence of his being. The absolute future turns out to be the ultimate past and the way to reach it is through remembrance.

Death removes us from both the humanly constituted world and the divine fabric. Since man is transitory, he loses both the world into which he is created as well as the world he created for himself by his love of the world.

Das Böse ist immer nur extrem, aber niemals radikal, es hat keine Tiefe, auch keine Dämonie. Es kann die ganze Welt verwüsten, gerade weil es wie ein Pilz an der Oberfläche weiterwuchert. Tief aber und radikal ist immer nur das Gute.

An "idealist" was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody.

Vernunft (reason) is traced back to its origin in the verb vernehmen (to perceive, to hear)

Il y'a des choses qui sont plus fortes que l'individu chez qui on les rencontre ou qui les porte

NOTHING is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered.

Just as the most lasting result of imperialist expansion was the export of the idea of the nation-state to the four corners of the earth, so the end of imperialism under the pressure of nationalism has led to the dissemination of the idea of revolution all over the globe.

The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program. Even before the Nazis' rise to power, these Twenty-Five Points had been no more than a concession to the party system and to such prospective voters as were old-fashioned enough to ask what was the program of the party they were going to join.

For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar—which he obviously was not.

the undeniable loss of tradition in the world does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe. . . .

Whatever the French Revolution did and did not achieve—and it did not achieve human equality—it liberated the poor from obscurity, from nonvisibility. What has seemed irrevocable ever since is that those who were devoted to freedom could remain reconciled to a state of affairs in which freedom from want—the freedom to be free—was a privilege of the few.

the customary academic suspicion of anything that is not guaranteed to be mediocre need have been involved.

The] artisans [...] men whose chief interest is their craft and not the market place.