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… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us… — 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
