Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German Historian born October 14, 1906 and died December 4, 1975. She taught political science and philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Chicago. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant and original thinker, her works include Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Human Condition.

Hannah Arendt was the Author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, a three-part study of the philosophical origins of the totalitarian mind. This volume focuses on the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"Arendt argues that the Western philosophical tradition has devalued the world of human action which attends to appearances (the vita activa), subordinating it to the life of contemplation which concerns itself with essences and the eternal (the vita contemplativa)."

Whole she called herself an agnostic on on few occasions, Hannah Arendt appeared to be a woman of faith. She desired her contemporaries to reestablish a faith in reason.

Arendt had a critical perspective on modern masses that form societies. She seems to reject some of the basic assumption of the Critical Theory including the generalization that modern society produce de-individualization on a large scale.

"This particular example, incidentally, shows that mutualism, properly constructed, does not require arbitrary imposition of egalitarian principles or de-individualization. Entangled individuals may be more or less prominent depending on the situation. They may even be rewarded unequally. Mutualism does not entail socialism or fascism, or any other -ism that attempts to enforce a substantive sort of uniformity on a group. It does not require that there be no heroes, celebrities, and stars (Arendt gets this, but Le Guin for example, seems uncomfortable with it)."

"Arendt also claims that with the expansion of the social realm the tripartite division of human activities has been undermined to the point of becoming meaningless. In her view, once the social realm has established its monopoly, the distinction between labor, work and action is lost, since every effort is now expended on reproducing our material conditions of existence. Obsessed with life, productivity, and consumption, we have turned into a society of laborers and jobholders who no longer appreciate the values associated with work, nor those associated with action."

She was herself influenced by: Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Walten Benjamin, Socrates. But it is unfair to classify her political philosophy in terms of the traditional categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism.

Often quoted by Mattias Desmet who wrote the book The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

Quotes

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. - Hannah Arendt

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. - Hannah Arendt

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Where 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.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up. - Hannah Arendt

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

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.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

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.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

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.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

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.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. - Hannah Arendt The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.Share this Quote Hannah Arendt