Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Johanna "Hannah" Arendtwas a German-born Jew and American political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." She escaped Europe during the Holocaust, becoming an American citizen. Her works deal with the nature of power, and the subjects...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 October 1906
CityHanover, Germany
CountryGermany
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.
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
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.
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.