The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the … - 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. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.

English
Collect this quote

About Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American political theorist whose work deals with the nature of power, authority, and totalitarianism.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Johanna "Hannah" Arendt Johanna "Hannah" Cohn Arendt Hannah Arendt Bluecher Hanna Arendt Johanna Arendt Hannah Arendt Blücher
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Hannah Arendt

She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality.

[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.

Go Premium

Support Quotewise while enjoying an ad-free experience and premium features.

View Plans
To be curious about someone opened you to contamination from them. But she was still determined to play him a trick, to take a revenge for Kay, for women, and most of all for the impudence of his associating himself with her. She had no pity for Harald. Swinging the car into line behind the funeral procession, she waited for the question he would ask. “To be superior,” he said, “of course, is not only a prerequisite for tragedy; it is tragedy. Hamlet’s tragedy.

Loading...