Quote

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Hannah Arendt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Thoughtlessness
Interdependence
Strange
Evil

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

Image
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Kant ... discovered the scandal of reason, that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible.
Hannah Arendt
Image
[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt
Image
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
Image
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Thought and action must never part company.
Hannah Arendt
Image
What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.
Hannah Arendt
Image
... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt
Image
It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
Hannah Arendt
Image
power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.
Hannah Arendt
Image
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
Hannah Arendt