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
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
Topics: Prophecy
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: Death, Dying
Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
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
Topics: Protest
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
Topics: Justice
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
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Luxury
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Perfectionism
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
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: Necessity, Freedom
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Promises
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: World
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Storytelling, Writing
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
Topics: Truth, Wishes
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Revolutions, Revolution
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
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: Law, Lawyers
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
Topics: War
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
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
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
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
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Beauty
It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
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
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
Topics: Excess
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
Topics: War
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Economics, Economy
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
Topics: Forgiveness
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