Quote: 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: How do you want the world to be in fifty years? and What do you want your life to be like five years from now? the answers are quite often preceded by Provided there is still a world and Provided I am still alive. To the often-heard question, Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods --moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former --but no opinion. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. [Hannah Arendt]
Quote: The Third World is not a reality but an ideology. [Hannah Arendt]