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Evil
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[There is] a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
-Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
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Freedom
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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.
-Hannah Arendt
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Hypocrisy
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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.
-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, ch. 2, 1963
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Ideas
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Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.
-Hannah Arendt
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Learning
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The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less...
-Hannah Arendt, "Crises of the Republic," "On Violence", 1972
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Opinion
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Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods—moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former—but no opinion.
-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, ch. 6 (1963)
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Promises
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Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.
-Hannah Arendt
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Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.
-Hannah Arendt
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Propaganda
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
-Hannah Arendt
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It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been “spoiled” by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 10, Harcourt (1951)
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Revolution
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
-Hannah Arendt
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Storytelling
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
-Hannah Arendt
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Tyranny
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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
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War
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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.
-Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, "On Violence.", 1972
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Books by and about Hannah Arendt
