Hannah Arendt Quotes
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The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.
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The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
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Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity.
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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it.
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Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
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Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.
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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
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The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses-not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.
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The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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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.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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The fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
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As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
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The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
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The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.