Quotes from Hannah Arendt

Under the conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under the totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to avoid the dangers that man fears.

Schuld door associatie' is een eenvoudige, maar vernuftige kunstgreep. Het gevolg ervan is dat, zodra iemand aangeklaagd wordt, zijn vroegere vrienden onmiddellijk zijn bitterste vijanden worden.; om hun eigen vel te redden, geven ze vrijwillig informatie en komen ze plots met aantijgingen op de proppen, om de niet bestaande bewijslast tegen de betrokkene te verzwaren; alleen op die manier kunnen ze hun eigen betrouwbaarheid bewijzen.

Technically speaking, Khrushchev's coup followed the methods of his dead and denounced master very closely. He too needed an outside force in order to win power in the party hierarchy, and he used the support of Marshal Zhukov and the army exactly the same way Stalin had used his relationships to the secret police in the succession struggle of thirty years ago.

for just as Stalin had never hesitated to purge his police cadres and liquidate their chief, so Khrushchev had followed up his inner-party maneuvers by removing Zhukov from the Presidium and Central Committee of the party, to which he had been elected after the coup, as well as from his post as highest commander of the army.

Can life be said to exist at all?

those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.

Just because the Jews had been used as a non-national element, they could be of value in war and peace only as long as during the war everybody tried consciously to keep the possibilities of peace intact, only as long as everybody's aim was a peace of compromise and the re-establishment of a modus vivendi. As soon as "victory or death" became a determining policy, and war actually aimed at the complete annihilation of the enemy, the Jews could no longer be of any use.

neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.

War in the era of machines could not possibly breed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor or manliness ... It imposed upon men nothing but the experience of bare destruction together with the humiliation of being only small cogs in the majestic wheel of slaughter.

Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.

The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be happy or thought that mortal men could be happy.

Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of eternal antisemitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence.

they had somehow drawn the conclusion that authority, and especially high authority, was favorable to them and that lower officials, and especially the common people, were dangerous. This prejudice, which expressed a definite historical truth but no longer corresponded to new circumstances, was as deeply rooted in and as unconsciously shared by the vast majority of Jews as corresponding prejudices about Jews were commonly accepted by Gentiles.

La libertad de ser libres significaba ante todo ser libre no solo del temor, sino también de la necesidad

The absence of a political hierarchy in the nation-state and the victory of equality rendered 'society secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.

A]ll historical and political evidence clearly points to the more-than-intimate connection between the lesser and the greater evil.… The natural conclusion from the true insight into a century so fraught with danger of the greatest evil should be a radical negation of the whole concept of the lesser evil in politics, because far from protecting us against the greater ones, the lesser evils have invariably led us into them.

No nation-state could with a clear conscience ever try to conquer foreign peoples, since such a conscience comes only from the conviction of the conquering nation that it is imposing a superior law upon barbarians.

The bourgeoisie, so long excluded from government by the nation-state and by their own lack of interest in public affairs, was politically emancipated by imperialism. Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.

It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity, even the processes of mere thought, must culminate in the absolute quiet of contemplation.11 Every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in complete human stillness.12 Traditionally

Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding.

In the simplicity of everyday life one rule reigns supreme: Each good action, even for a 'bad cause,' adds some real goodness to the world; each bad action even for the most beautiful of all ideals makes our common world a little worse.

Massa's worden niet overtuigd door feiten, zelfs niet door verzonnen feiten, maar uitsluitend door de consistentie van het systeem waarvan ze menen deel uit te maken. Herhaling - waarvan het belang enigszins overschat wordt, om dat men meestal gelooft dat de massa's weinig of niet in staat zijn om te snappen en te onthouden - is alleen belangrijk omdat ze de maa's overtuigt van de consistentie van de tijd.

But before Nazism, in the course of its totalitarian policy, attempted to change man into a beast, there were numerous efforts to develop him on a strictly hereditary basis into a god.

The world of native savages was a perfect setting for men who had escaped the reality of civilization. Under a merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, they were confronted with human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.