Quotes from Hannah Arendt

What are we "doing" when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?

The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt.

Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.

For it is evident that 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.

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Here it is self-evident that public admiration and monetary reward are of the same nature and can become substitutes for each other. Public admiration, too, is something to be used and consumed, and status, as we would say today, fulfils one need as food fulfils another: public admiration is consumed by individual vanity as food is consumed by hunger.

Social and economic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

Life may contain the essence (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the elixir; and eventually you may even be privileged to make something out of it, to compound the story. But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat as such it will only play its tricks on you.

The methods used for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself.

No puedes pretender que quien te ama te trate a ti menos cruelmente de lo que se trata a sí mismo. La igualdad en el amor tiene siempre algo de horrible.

Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.

what we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life

In other words, if a patent forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical facts of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.

To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.

No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.

On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.

L'homme gagne sa liberté non pas en travaillant, mais davantage en créant, et surtout en se confrontant à la pluralité, en ayant le courage de dire ce qu'il pense quelles que soient ses chances d'être véritablement entendu, comme le veut la fragilité des affaires humaines.

Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.

What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent?