Hannah Arendt

“La richiesta universale di felicità e infelicità largamente diffusa nella nostra società sono i segni più convincenti che viviamo in una società dominata dal lavoro, ma che non ha abbastanza lavoro per esserne appagata.”

“E che cos'altro è, infine, questo ideale della società moderna se non l'antico sogno del povero e dell'indigente, che può avere un fascino finchè rimane sogno, ma diventa il paradiso di un pazzo non appena è realizzato?”

“La fatica e la pena", per ottenere i beni necessari alla vita, e il piacere di "incorporarli" sono così strettamente legati assieme nel ciclo biologico che la perfetta eliminazione della pena e dello sforzo del lavoro non solo spoglierebbe la vita biologica dei suoi piaceri più naturali, ma priverebbe la vita specificamente umana della sua stessa vivacità e vitalità. La condizione umane è tale che la pena e lo sforzo non sono semplici sintomi, che possono essere rimossi senza cambiare la vita stessa; sono piuttosto modi in cui la vita, insieme con la necessità cui è legata, si fa percepire. Per i mortali, la "facile vita degli dei" sarebbe una vita senza vitalità.”

“La nascita e la morte degli esseri umani non sono semplici eventi naturali,ma sono connesse a un mondo in cui singoli individui - uniche, insostituibili e irripetibili entità - appaiono o da cui scompaiono. La morte e la nascita presuppongono un mondo che non è in costante movimento,ma la cui durevolezza e relativa permanenza rendono possibili l'apparizione e la scomparsa, un mondo esistente prima che un qualsiasi individuo vi facesse la sua apparizione e che sopravviverà quando infine scomparirà.”

“non seulement le passé n’est jamais mort, mais il n’est même pas passé”

“La pensée se dédouble entre pensée abstraite et jugement dès qu’elle fait intervenir le dialogue avec soi.”

“Ce n’est ni une question d’intelligence ou de stupidité. Celui qui ne connaît pas le dialogue avec lui-même ne verra aucune difficulté à se contredire luimême, ce qui signifie qu’il ne sera jamais capable de – ni ne voudra - rendre compte de ce qu’il a dit ou fait ; il ne pourra non plus s’inquiéter de commettre quelque crime puisqu’il peut être sûr qu’aussitôt il l’oubliera”

“Seuls ceux qui sont amoureux de la sagesse auraient envie de penser. Cela revient à une tautologie décevante. Pour être apte à penser, il faudrait aimer la beauté et la justice et donc avoir une âme bonne. Le monde serait divisé en bons et en méchants sans qu’on sache pourquoi. Cette division, c’est exactement ce que nous ne cherchions pas. Dès lors il faut reprendre l’analyse.”

“C’est par le verbe et l’acte que nous nous insérons dans le monde humain, et cette insertion est comme une seconde naissance dans laquelle nous confirmons et assurons le fait brut de notre apparition physique originelle .”

“L’homme gagne sa liberté non pas en travaillant, mais davantage en créant, et surtout en se confrontant à la pluralité, en ayant le courage de dire ce qu’il pense quelles que soient ses chances d’être véritablement entendu, comme le veut la fragilité des affaireshumaines.”

“Ce monde d’objets révèle de façon spectaculaire la partie non mortelle des êtres mortels. Tout se passe comme si la stabilité du monde se faisait transparente dans la permanence de l’art”

“si personne ne peut rendre la justice, c’est que tout le monde est coupable.”

“Tant que nous souffrons, dans les conditions du désert, nous sommes encore humains, encore intacts .”

“Le danger consiste en ce que nous devenions de véritables habitants du désert et que nous nous sentions bien chez lui.”

“the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”

“No puedes pretender que quien te ama te trate a ti menos cruelmente de lo que se trata a sí mismo. La igualdad en el amor tiene siempre algo de horrible.”

“Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.”

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”

“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.' - On Civil Disobedience in 1969”

“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.”

“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.”

“It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this "who" in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the "who," which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters. This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for (the doer of good works) nor against them (the criminal) that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure.”

“[Justice] demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.”

“Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ...”

“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.”

“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

“The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.”

“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.”

“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no “time to waste.” He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. “I don’t need that ” he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself nay he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while gentlemen we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows his memory played him the last trick he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral. 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.”

“Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began.”

“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time”

“Ihmisen tekemä sateliitti ei toki ollut kuu tai tähti eikä mikään muukaan taivaankappale, joka kulkee kiertoradallaan niin kauan, että se tuntuu meistä maalliseen aikaan sidotuista kuolevaisista ikuisuudelta. Se onnistui silti pysymään taivaalla jonkin aikaa ja liikkui taivaankappaleiden läheisyydessä ikään kuin se olisi koemielessä saanut luvan tulla niiden ylevään seuraan”

“Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”

“That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.”

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”

“Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.”

“Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”

“Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.”

“And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.”

“Since the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920, the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state.”

“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”

“Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

“The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility──of being unable to undo what one has done──is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.”

“When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

“Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.”

“Niemand hat das Recht zu gehorchen.”