Quotes About Arendt

The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration. To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls specificity, the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.

Drakuli? titled her book "They Would Never Hurt a Fly," after Arendt's description of a typical Nazi functionary who "does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.

Arendt did have a certain snobbishness, though in some of her writing she expressed more democratic attitudes.

Arendt observed the attraction of authoritarianism to people who feel resentful or unsuccessful back in the 1940s, when she wrote that the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power,

Hannah] Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space - in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely.

it is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.

As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered.

A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.

of Plato's Republic and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she did own in her root