Hannah Arendt quotes - page 3

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about. (Hannah Arendt)
Kant [...] stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge [...] to make room for faith,” but all he had "denied” was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
Hannah Arendt
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Hannah Arendt
War has . . . become a luxury which only the small nations can afford.
Hannah Arendt
Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization - the man-made artifact to house successive generations - would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
Hannah Arendt
For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.
Hannah Arendt
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
[H]e was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.[...] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him.[...] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
Hannah Arendt
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism. (Hannah Arendt)
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
Hannah Arendt
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.
Hannah Arendt
Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Hannah Arendt
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
Hannah Arendt
No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
Hannah Arendt
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
Hannah Arendt
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
Hannah Arendt
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Hannah Arendt
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one. (Hannah Arendt)
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Hannah Arendt
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt