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
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
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
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
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Luxury
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
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
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
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Perfectionism
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
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
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
—Hannah Arendt
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Beauty
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
Luck serves … as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Luck, Fortune
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
Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
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
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: World
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
Topics: Love
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
Topics: Freedom
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Thinking
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
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Violence
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
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
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
—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. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Truth, Wishes
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations… is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
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