Hannah Arendt Quotes

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.

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides. On that occasion, as generally in the future, I compromised.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

In violence we forget who we are.

It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to ‘conquer space’ and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for ‘true reality’ that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena as they reveal themselves of their own accord to human sense and reason. They were inspired by an extraordinary love of harmony and lawfulness which taught them that they would have to step outside any merely given sequence or series of occurrences if they wanted to discover the overall beauty and order of the whole, that is, the universe.

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.

I understand what you are feeling,” he said. “As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.

In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.

She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention.

The Nazis were ‘convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,’ Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proven time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.

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.