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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 1
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
It was as though in those last minutes he (Eichmann) was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the ''easy life of the gods'' would be a lifeless life. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Hannah Arendt German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0
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 German Philosopher More Hannah Arendt Quotes 0