German-American political theorist (1906-1975)
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
If ... the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
Deification of accidents serves of course as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Action without a name, a "who" attached to it, is meaningless.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Life of the Mind
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.
HANNAH ARENDT
letter to James Baldwin, Nov. 21, 1962
Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
HANNAH ARENDT
Men in Dark Times
Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself.
HANNAH ARENDT
interview, SWR TV, Das Thema, Nov. 9, 1964