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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Conviction
Totalitarian
Among
Refinement
Century
Martyr
Dies
Convictions
Death
Permit
Government
Belongs
Great
Opponents
Refinements
Dramatic
Totalitarianism

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The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.
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His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
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... the space left to freedom is very small.ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.
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thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.
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Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.
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Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
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Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Every thought is an afterthought.
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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
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If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.
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Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
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Power and violence are opposites where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
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They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world's reality is actually expressed by their escape.
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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
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Kant ... was also quite aware that the urgent need of reason is both different from and more than mere quest and desire for knowledge. Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.
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