Quotes from Hannah Arendt

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.

There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

Thought and action must never part company.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.

It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of 'destiny,' you not only change its 'natural laws' but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate.

Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.