Hannah Arendt Quotes on Politics
Hannah Arendt's political philosophy is organized around the recovery of action (praxis) as a distinct mode of human activity — distinct from labor and work — in which human beings appear to one another as unique agents in a public world of speech. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) analyzes the Nazi and Stalinist movements as a wholly novel form of rule that destroys the public and private spheres alike through ideology and terror. The Human Condition (1958) develops the positive vita activa, On Revolution recovers the lost American republican tradition of public freedom, and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) introduces the concept of the banality of evil — the way ordinary thoughtlessness can underwrite extraordinary administrative atrocity.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“The banality of evil.”
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“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”
On Violence -
Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“Politics is not the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”
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“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
The New Yorker (12 September 1970) -
“It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to ‘conquer space’ and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for ‘true reality’ that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena”
On scientific discovery, in Between Past and Future (1961) as quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times (4 December 2017) -
“Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”
Men in Dark Times (1968) -
“In a head-on clash between violence and power , the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”
On Violence (1970) -
“The essence of totalitarian government , and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.”
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963) | As quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times -
“The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | "Civil Disobedience" -
“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.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | "On Violence" -
“I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .”
Speaking of her book The Human Condition , as quoted in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, p. xxiv -
“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.”
Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books (1974) -
“The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951) | Part 3, Ch. 10