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Hannah Arendt Quotes

Browse 5 quotes about Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt Quotes

“Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.”

EvilDictatorshipRapeTotalitarianismArgentina1970sBanality Of EvilHannah ArendtJorge Rafael VidelaHitch 22
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“To be so at one with one's own destiny that no one will be able to tell the dancer from the dance, that the answer to the question, Who are you? will be the Cardinal's answer, "Allow me ... to answer you in the classic manner, and to tell you a story," is the only aspiration worthy of the fact that life has been given us. This is also called pride, and the true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being"in love with {their} destiny" or whether they "accept as success what others warrant to be so ... at the quotation of the day. They tremble, with reason, before their fate.”

DestinyHannah Arendt
Book:Daguerreotypes and Other Essays
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“Acts of civil disobedience were neither the sheer lawlessness of criminals nor the rejection of law itself by anarchists and terrorists. Instead, in civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt saw how the moral act of individual conscience—I cannot live with myself if I consent to this—could sometimes also become a political act. Civil disobedience happens when people are not heard and when a significant number of people see that their government is clearly heading in a lawless direction. The civil disobedient, Arendt said, acts in the name and for the sake of a group; he defies the law and the established authorities on the ground of basic dissent. The civil disobedient is not lawless, she is acting together with others precisely in the spirit of the laws—breathing together, Arendt says.”

JusticeDemocracyCivil DisobedienceHannah Arendt
Book:We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience
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“Arendt's point is rather that throughout modern German history Jews were pawns, more or less and almost necessarily willing pawns, in the game of power politics. They were used by the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the liberals, and discarded by each of those opposed factions when their usefulness, which was financial, was either used up or no longer deemed socially desirable.”

Anti SemitismPower Politics2007Hannah ArendtJuden
Book:The Jewish Writings
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