German-American political theorist (1906-1975)
When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.
HANNAH ARENDT
interview, SWR TV, Das Thema, Nov. 9, 1964
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
HANNAH ARENDT
"On Violence", Crises of the Republic
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
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
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
preface, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
HANNAH ARENDT
The New Yorker, Sep. 12, 1970
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
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
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. Yet, within the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical they should be killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed to contaminate the population; if they have "slave-like souls" (Himmler), no one should waste his time trying to re-educate them.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.
HANNAH ARENDT
Between Past and Future
A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
HANNAH ARENDT
interview, SWR TV, Das Thema, Nov. 9, 1964
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
HANNAH ARENDT
Crises of the Republic
The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed.
HANNAH ARENDT
Between Past and Future
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
HANNAH ARENDT
"Thinking", The Life of the Mind
Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.
HANNAH ARENDT
postscript to the revised edition, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
HANNAH ARENDT
attributed, Aspects of Love: An Exploration of 1 Corinthians 13
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
HANNAH ARENDT
epilogue, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
HANNAH ARENDT
"The Crisis in Education"
The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind