Quotes from Hannah Arendt

fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

Death shows man that he is nothing if man does not understand himself as a part of the whole. By showing man his nothingness, however, death also points out both his source and a possible escape from nothingness—from death.

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm.

Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.

Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.

The question about man's own being, in which the specific being in life assumes such decisive importance even if it is seen as a nullity, becomes a moot question. The concrete course of life is no longer important. If death only brings us a new being (which in fact is our original being), existence has been leveled out, and it does not matter whether human life is long or short.

Ideologists who pretend to possess the key to reality are forced to change and twist their opinions about single cases according to the latest events and can never afford to come into conflict with their ever-changing deity, reality. It would be absurd to ask people to be reliable who by their very convictions must justify any given situation.

If you wish to found a republic, you first must pull the people out of a condition of misery that corrupts them. There are no political virtues without pride, and no one can have pride who is wretched.

The word 'revolutionary' can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.

who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think;

Sofern Vergangenheit als Tradition überliefert ist, hat sie Autorität; sofern Autorität sich geschichtlich darstellt, wird sie zur Tradition. Walter Benjamin wusste, dass Traditionsbruch und Autoritätsverlust irreperabel waren, und zog daraus den Schluss, neue Wege für den Umgang mit der Vergangenheit zu suchen.

order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.

The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things works and deeds and words which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.

When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before"; and the only reason his prophecy did not come true was the constitutional restraint of the nation-state, while today our only hope that it will not come true in the future is based on the constitutional restraints of the American republic plus the technological restraints of the nuclear age.

The disintegration processes which have become so manifest in recent years—the decay of public services: schools, police, mail delivery, garbage collection, transportation, et cetera; the death rate on the highways and the traffic problems in the cities; the pollution of air and water—are the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable

And as for the nation, it is obvious that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.

democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.

The fact that the word revolution originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.

Wo alle schuldig sind, ist es keiner; gegen die Entdeckung der wirklich Schuldigen und Verantwortlichen, die Mißstände abstellen könnten, gibt es keinen besseren Schutz als kollektive Schuldbekenntnisse

Whoever takes upon himself political responsibility will always come to the point where he says with Hamlet: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right! To set the time aright means to renew the world, and this we can do because we all arrived at one time or another as newcomers in a world which was there before us and will still be there when we are gone, when we shall have left its burden to our successors.

different, demonstrates clearly, I think, not only that the conquest of poverty is a prerequisite for the foundation of freedom, but also that liberation from poverty cannot be dealt with in the same way as liberation from political oppression.