Quotes from Hannah Arendt

Uma vida sem pensamento é totalmente possível, mas ela fracassa em fazer desabrochar sua própria essência – ela não é apenas sem sentido; ela não é totalmente viva. Pessoas que não pensam são como sonâmbulos [...] Em nome de interesses pessoais, muitos abdicam do pensamento crítico, engolem abusos e sorriem para quem desprezam. Abdicar de pensar também é crime.

South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics.

Le mensonge est plus fort que la vérité, car il comble l'attente.

The hatred of the racists against the Jews sprang from a superstitious apprehension that it actually might be the Jews, and not themselves, whom God had chosen, to whom success was granted by divine providence. There was an element of feeble-minded resentment against a people who, it was feared, had received a rationally incomprehensible guarantee that they would emerge eventually, and in spite of appearances, as the final victors in world history.

fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin's and Hitler's

De belangrijkste handicap van de totalitaire propaganda is dat ze deze hunker van de massa's naar een volledig consistente, begrijpelijke en voorspelbare wereld niet kan bevredigen zonder ernstig in conflict te raken met het gezond verstand.

The open, unashamed adoption of what had become to the whole world the most prominent sign of Nazism was the last compliment Stalin paid to his late colleague and rival in total domination with whom, much to his chagrin, he had not been able to come to a lasting agreement.

On politics] And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

executive branch of this particular government was not the party but the police, whose "operational activities were not regulated through party channels";

Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded.

Als de massa moet kiezen tussen een confrontatie met de anarchistische groei en totale willekeur van het verval en een onderwerping aan de meest rigide, fantastisch-fictieve consistentie van een ideologie, dan zal ze waarschijnlijk altijd het laatste kiezen, en zal ze bereid zijn daarvoor met individuele offers te betalen.

Voor een organisatie die functioneert volgens de principes 'wie niet ingesloten is, is uitgesloten' en 'wie niet met mij is, is tegen mij' verliest de wereld in haar geheel elke nuance, elke differentiatie en elke pluraliteit.

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.

La razón principal de que la guerra siga con nosotros no es un secreto deseo de muerte de la especie humana, ni un irreprimible instinto de agresión ni, final y más plausiblemente, los serios peligros económicos y sociales inherentes al desarme, sino el simple hecho de que no haya aparecido todavía en la escena política un sustituto de este árbitro final.

The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments. To claim, as is often done, that a tiny unarmed minority has successfully, by means of violence—shouting, kicking up a row, et cetera—disrupted large lecture classes whose overwhelming majority had voted for normal instruction procedures is therefore very misleading.

Ä°nsan doÄŸas? gereÄŸi, bir kere baÅŸ gösteren ve insanl?k tarihine kaydedilen her fiil, gerçekliÄŸi tarihe gömülüp gittikten uzun zaman sonra bile hep ileride gerçekleÅŸebilecek bir ihtimal olarak kal?r.

Toda virtud comienza con el cumplido que se le hace, mediante el cual se expresa la satisfacción por ella.

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.

Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.

The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.