Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand--in the same sense that I have understood--that gives me a sense… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
