Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story... Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author.
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Hannah Arendt
Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (/ˈɛərənt/ or /ˈɑːrənt/; German: [ˈaːʀənt]; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born Jewish American political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." She escaped Europe during the Holocaust, becoming an American citizen. Her works deal with the nature of power and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. The Hannah Arendt Prize is named in her honor. 2Life and career Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (now a part of Hanover), the daughter of Martha (born Cohn) and Paul Arendt. She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad when it was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. Arendt's family was thoroughly assimilated and she later remembered: "With us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it." Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering antisemitism as an adult. She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen, a 19th-century Prussian hostess who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born and had grown up Jewis
The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his…
Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.
The aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to prove that its respective supersense has been right.
The experience of the concentration camps shows that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and man’s 'nature' is only 'human' insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man.
Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children to their death; how is he to decide? The…
Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion.
The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy.
Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews.
I've written this against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.
I write with both reckless optimism and reckless despair. I believe that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.
You see in Kant a clash between the principle according to which you act and the principle according to which you judge.
Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand.
The wonder that is the starting-point of thinking is neither puzzlement nor surprise nor perplexity; it is an admiring wonder. What we marvel at is confirmed and affirmed by admiration which breaks out into speech, the gift of Iris, the rainbow, the messenger from above.
The meaning of what actually happens and appears while it is happening is revealed when it has disappeared.
Reason comes from the Latin ratio, derived from the verb reor, ratus sum, which means to calculate and also ratiocinate.
Each new generation, every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought. And it is after all possible, and seems to me likely, that the strange survival of great works, their…