{"author":"Hannah Arendt","author_id":"Hannah+Arendt","total_quotes":76,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["know","street","lying "],"id":6019,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["loneliness","solitude","thinking"],"id":17547,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world— the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["artifice","concept-of-history","history","lonely","man","nature","society","the-self"],"id":20479,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1967","democracy","democracy-fails","dreyfus","fascism","french-republic","third-republic"],"id":27532,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1968","antisemitism","communism","historians","history","ideology","marxism","post-factual","post-truth","race-theory","reality-control","sophism","totalitarianism"],"id":30590,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["germany","lies","mendacity","nazism","self-deception","stupidity"],"id":32609,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["forgiveness"],"id":33329,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["thinking","totalitarianism"],"id":35765,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["guilt"],"id":41172,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["promises","way","human "],"id":41784,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":76,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}