if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.” — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“Of these, only the last, the crime against humanity, was new and unprecedented. Aggressive warfare is at least as old as recorded… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us,… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
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… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“Totalitarian politics—far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist—use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity,… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
