Hannah Arendt Quotes - Page 9

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... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.

Hannah Arendt

Religious, Loss, Afterlife

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

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Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?

Hannah Arendt

Men, Thinking, Evil

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

Hannah Arendt

Past, Different, Treasure

"Martin Heidegger at Eighty". "Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays". Book by Michael Murray, p. 294, 1978.

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We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world.

Hannah Arendt

Heart, Essence, Political

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Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor.

Hannah Arendt

Animal, Men, Astrology

Hannah Arendt (1978). “Willing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.

Hannah Arendt

Character, May, Something New

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Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Hannah Arendt

Plato, Believe, Teaching

Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn (2006). “Between Past and Future”, p.30, Penguin

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In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.

Hannah Arendt

Love Is, Hypocrisy, Stranger

Letter to James Baldwin, November 21, 1962.

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the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.

Hannah Arendt

Morning, Freedom, Decision

Hannah Arendt (1978). “Willing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible.

Hannah Arendt

Political, Foundation, Expansion

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.29, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.

Hannah Arendt

Animal, Reality, Ideas

Hannah Arendt (1966). “The origins of totalitarianism”

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By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The difference between pauper and criminal disappears - both stand outside society.

Hannah Arendt

Responsibility, Caring, Rights

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

Hannah Arendt

Mean, Thinking, Clue

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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There exists in our society widespread fear of judging…[B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done…Who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it?

Hannah Arendt

Judging, Doubt, Would Be

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There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Hannah Arendt

Confusion, Holocaust, Essentials

Hannah Arendt (1951). “The Burden of Our Time”

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The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is….we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism.

Hannah Arendt

Responsibility, Men, Essence

"The Origins of Totalitarianism". Book by Hannah Arendt, progressive.org. 1951.

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Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order.

Hannah Arendt

Past, Order, Needs

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

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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

Thinking, Mind, Matter

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.

Hannah Arendt

Men, Sensual, Stubborn

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.49, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

Hannah Arendt

Nature, Keys, Law

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?

Hannah Arendt

Life, Thinking, Doe

Hannah Arendt, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (2007). “Reflections on Literature and Culture”, p.271, Stanford University Press

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Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.

Hannah Arendt

Acceptance, Self, Expression

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For excellence, the presence of others is always required.

Hannah Arendt

Writing, Excellence

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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

Hannah Arendt

Government, Opponents, Dramatic

Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.206, Penguin

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Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

Hannah Arendt

Freedom, Taken, Progress

Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.4, University of Chicago Press

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Born: October 14, 1906
Died: December 4, 1975
Occupation: Philosopher
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