Hannah arendt Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Hannah Arendt
Quotes of Author: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt _ The Origins of Totalitarianism
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.
book-quote discussion logic propaganda
Hannah Arendt _ The Human Condition
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility──of being unable to undo what one has done──is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.
book-quote plurality promise
Hannah Arendt _ Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no "time to waste." He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. "I don't need that " he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself nay he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: "After a short while gentlemen we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria. I shall not forget them." In the face of death he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows his memory played him the last trick he was "elated" and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
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Hannah Arendt _ The Human Condition
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Hannah Arendt _ The Human Condition
Men in plural {…} can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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Hannah Arendt _ Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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Hannah Arendt _ The Origins of Totalitarianism
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.
book-quote politics totalitarianism politics-language
Hannah Arendt _ The Origins of Totalitarianism
Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility."
book-quote history historians totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt _ The Human Condition
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.
book-quote politics
Hannah Arendt _ The Human Condition
The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
book-quote romance
Hannah Arendt _ The Origins of Totalitarianism
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 man who can fabricate it.
book-quote fascism totalitarianism propaganda
Hannah Arendt _ The Life of the Mind
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
book-quote thinking