Quotes About Hannah Arendt

For we [B:033139] call 'world' not only this fabric which God made, heaven and earth . . . but the inhabitants of the world are also called 'the world.' . . . Especially all lovers of the world are called the world."35

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

George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Johnson administration and the only adviser who dared to break the taboo and recommend immediate withdrawal, had the courage to tell the President in 1965).

The greatest revolutionary innovation, Madison's discovery of the federal principle for the foundation of large republics

Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),2 the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare.

I can only seek that thing of whose existence I have some kind of knowledge.

With the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free, Penguin Books, 2020.

When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before"; and the only reason his prophecy did not come true was the constitutional restraint of the nation-state, while today our only hope that it will not come true in the future is based on the constitutional restraints of the American republic plus the technological restraints of the nuclear age.

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.

Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, decoupling politics from reality has a long history: "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.

As Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, decoupling politics from reality has a long history: "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic. Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument, or a position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive.

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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.

Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand--in the same sense that I have understood--that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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.

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

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

What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.

The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps were run by ordinary bureaucrats: the evil was astonishing in its banality.

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.

It was Hannah Arendt who first noted, back in 1951, that "totalitarianism in power 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