Johanna “Hannah” Cohn Arendt (1906–75) was a German-born American philosopher and political theorist. A Jewish refugee from Hitler, she is famous for her moral analysis of the 20th century’s cataclysmic history and her works of political philosophy.
Born in Hanover into a Jewish family, Arendt studied in the German existentialist tradition of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. She had an affair with Heidegger and, when he joined the Nazi Party and began implementing Nazi educational policies, she moved to Paris in 1933. She escaped the Nazi occupation to America in 1941.
In America, Arendt held several major academic posts, taught at the University of Chicago 1963–67, and subsequently at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Arendt’s first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951,) regarded the growth of totalitarianism as the outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. She argued that totalitarian regimes had revolutionized the social structure.
Arendt’s other books include The Human Condition (1958,) Between Past and Future (1961,) On Revolution (1963,) and On Violence (1970.) She is best remembered for Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963,) which expounded her idea of the ‘banality of evil’ arising from the 1963 trial of the German-Austrian Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
Arendt’s The Life of the Mind was published posthumously in 1978.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Propaganda
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
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
Topics: Reason
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Twentieth Century, Authority
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
Topics: Lawyers, Law
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
Topics: Obedience
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
Topics: Dying, Death
Fame comes in many sorts and sizes, from the one-week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name.
—Hannah Arendt
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Thinking
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Storytelling, Writing
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
Luck serves … as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Luck, Fortune
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Propaganda
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Perfectionism
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Loyalty
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
Topics: Learning
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Guilt
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
—Hannah Arendt
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
Topics: Effort
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
Topics: Freedom, Necessity
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Crime, Criminals
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
Topics: Reason, Opinions, Thought, Opinion
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Revolutions, Revolution
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
Topics: Honesty, Guilt
Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Solitude
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Forgiveness
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Speech, Conversation, Politics
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
Topics: Tyranny
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
Topics: Colleges, Universities, Education
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Words
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