Background Image

...

Political Institutions, No Matter How Well Or Badly Designed, Depend For Continued Existence Upon Acting Men; Their Conservation Is Achieved By The Same Means That Brought Them Into Being. Independent Existence Marks The Work Of Art As A Product Of Making; Utter Dependence Upon Further Acts To Keep It In Existence Marks The State As A Product Of Action.

-Hannah Arendt

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Political Institutions, No Matter

Hannah Arendt

...

Political Institutions, No Matter How Well Or Badly Designed, Depend For Continued Existence Upon Acting Men; Their Conservation Is Achieved By The Same Means That Brought Them Into Being. Independent Existence Marks The Work Of Art As A Product Of Making; Utter Dependence Upon Further Acts To Keep It In Existence Marks The State As A Product Of Action.

Views: 43890

Topic

More From Hannah Arendt

What Will Happen Once The Authentic Mass Man Takes Over, We Do Not Know Yet, Although It May Be A Fair Guess That He Will Have More In Common With The Meticulous, Calculated Correctness Of Himmler Than With The Hysterical Fanaticism Of Hitler, Will More Resemble The Stubborn Dullness Of Molotov Than The Sensual Vindictive Cruelty Of Stalin.

Political Institutions, No Matter How Well Or Badly Designed, Depend For Continued Existence Upon Acting Men; Their Conservation Is Achieved By The Same Means That Brought Them Into Being. Independent Existence Marks The Work Of Art As A Product Of Making; Utter Dependence Upon Further Acts To Keep It In Existence Marks The State As A Product Of Action.

No Civilization Would Ever Have Been Possible Without A Framework Of Stability, To Provide The Wherein For The Flux Of Change. Foremost Among The Stabilizing Factors, More Enduring Than Customs, Manners And Traditions, Are The Legal Systems That Regulate Our Life In The World And Our Daily Affairs With Each Other.

The Ultimate End Of Human Acts Is Eudaimonia, Happiness In The Sense Of Living Well, Which All Men Desire; All Acts Are But Different Means Chosen To Arrive At It.

It Is Rather Hard And Certainly Depressing To Admit Guilt And To Repent

Revolutions Are The Only Political Events Which Confront Us Directly And Inevitably With The Problem Of Beginning.

The Human Condition Is Such That Pain And Effort Are Not Just Symptoms Which Can Be Removed Without Changing Life Itself; They Are The Modes In Which Life Itself, Together With The Necessity To Which It Is Bound, Makes Itself Felt. For Mortals, The Easy Life Of The Gods Would Be A Lifeless Life.

Solitude Is The Human Condition 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.

A Theology Which Is Not Based On Revelation As A Given Reality But Treats God As An Idea Would Be As Mad As A Zoology Which Is No Longer Sure Of The Physical, Tangible Existence Of Animals.

We All Carry Fault Within.

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.

It Is The Nature Of Beginning That Something New Is Started Which Cannot Be Expected From Whatever May Have Happened Before. This Character Of Startling Unexpectedness Is Inherent In All Beginnings.

Thinking Does Not Lead To Truth; Truth Is The Beginning Of Thought.

Truthfulness Has Never Been Counted Among The Political Virtues, And Lies Have Always Been Regarded As Justifiable Tools In Political Dealings.

It Belongs Among The Refinements Of Totalitarian Government In Our Century That They Don't Permit Their Opponents To Die A Great, Dramatic Martyr's Death For Their Convictions.

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.

All Political Institutions Are Manifestations And Materializations Of Power; They Petrify And Decay As Soon As The Living Power Of The People Ceases To Uphold Them.

Manipulations Of Opinion, Insofar As They Are Inspired By Well-defined Interests, Have Limited Goals; Their Effect, However, If They Happen To Touch Upon An Issue Of Authentic Concern, Is No Longer Subject To Their Control And May Easily Produce Consequences They Never Foresaw Or Intended.

The Most Striking Difference Between Ancient And Modern Sophists Is That The Ancients Were Satisfied With A Passing Victory Of Argument At The Expense Of Truth, Whereas The Moderns Want A More Lasting Victory At The Expense Of Reality.

It Is In The Nature Of All Party Systems That The Authentically Political Talents Can Assert Themselves Only In Rare Cases, And It Is Even Rarer That The Specifically Political Qualifications Survive The Petty Maneuvers Of Party Politics With Its Demands For Plain Salesmanship.

The Insight That Peace Is The End Of War, And That Therefore A War Is The Preparation For Peace, Is At Least As Old As Aristotle, And The Pretense That The Aim Of An Armament Race Is To Guard The Peace Is Even Older, Namely As Old As The Discovery Of Propaganda Lies.

Mathematics, The Non-empirical Science Par Excellence . . . The Science Of Sciences, Delivering The Key To Those Laws Of Nature And The Universe Which Are Concealed By Appearances.

The Trouble With Lying And Deceiving Is That Their Efficiency Depends Entirely Upon A Clear Notion Of The Truth That The Liar And Deceiver Wishes To Hide.

The Public Sphere Is As Consistently Based On The Law Of Equality As The Private Sphere Is Based On The Law Of Universal Difference And Differentiation. Equality, In Contrast To All That Is Involved In Mere Existence, Is Not Given Us, But Is The Result Of Human Organization Insofar As It Is Guided By The Principle Of Justice. We Are Not Born Equal; We Become Equal As Members Of A Group On The Strength Of Our Decision To Guarantee Ourselves Mutually Equal Rights.

Since One Cannot Educate Adults, The Word "education" Has An Evil Sound In Politics; There Is A Pretense Of Education, When The Real Purpose Is Coercion Without The Use Of Force.

Of All Human Activities, Only Labor, And Neither Action Nor Work, Is Unending, Progressing Automatically In Accordance With Life Itself And Outside The Range Of Willful Decisions Or Humanly Meaningful Purposes.

Lacking The Truth, [we] Will However Finds Instants Of Truth, And These Instants Are In Fact All We Have Available To Us To Give Some Order To This Chaos Of Horror.

When We Think Of A Criminal, We Imagine Someone With Criminal Motives. And When We Look At Eichmann, He Doesn't Actually Have Any Criminal Motives. Not What Is Usually Understood By "criminal Motives." He Wanted To Go Along With The Rest. He Wanted To Say "we," And Going-along-with-the-rest And Wanting-to-say-we Like This Were Quite Enough To Make The Greatest Of All Crimes Possible. The Hitlers, After All, Really Aren't The Ones Who Are Typical In This Kind Of Situation--they'd Be Powerless Without The Support Of Others.

Every Thought Is Strictly Speaking An After-thought.

There Are No Parallels To The Life Of The Concentration Camps. All Seeming Parallels Create Confusion And Distract Attention From What Is Essential. Forced Labor In Prisons And Penal Colonies, Banishment, Slavery, All Seem For A Moment To Offer Helpful Comparisons, But On Closer Examination Lead Nowhere.

It Is In The Nature Of A Group And Its Power To Turn Against Independence, The Property Of Individual Strength.

Individual Strength

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.

Man Cannot Be Free If He Does Not Know That He Is Subject To Necessity, Because His Freedom Is Always Won In His Never Wholly Successful Attempts To Liberate Himself From Necessity.

Our Tradition Of Political Thought Had Its Definite Beginning In The Teachings Of Plato And Aristotle. I Believe It Came To A No Less Definite End In The Theories Of Karl Marx.

To Be Sure, Nothing Is More Important To The Integrity Of The Universities . . . Than A Rigorously Enforced Divorce From War-oriented Research And All Connected Enterprises.

The Need Of Reason Is Not Inspired By The Quest For Truth But By The Quest For Meaning. And Truth And Meaning Are Not The Same. The Basic Fallacy , Taking Precedence Over All Specific Metaphysical Fallacies, Is To Interpret Meaning On The Model Of Truth.

The Role Played By Education In All Political Utopias From Ancient Times Onward Shows How Natural It Seems To Start A New World With Those Who Are By Birth And Nature New. So Far As Politics Is Concerned, This Involves Of Course A Serious Misconception: Instead Of Joining With One's Equals In Assuming The Effort Of Persuasion And Running The Risk Of Failure, There Is Dictatorial Intervention, Based Upon The Absolute Superiority Of The Adult, And The Attempt To Produce The New As A Fait Accompli, That Is, As Though The New Already Existed.

Ideologies - Isms Which To The Satisfaction Of Their Adherents Can Explain Everything And Every Occurence By Deducing It From A Single Premise - Are A Very Recent Phenomenon ... Not Before Hitler And Stalin Were The Great Political Potentialities Of The Ideologies Discovered.

Politically Speaking, Tribal Nationalism [patriotism] Always Insists That Its Own People Are Surrounded By 'a World Of Enemies' - 'one Against All' - And That A Fundamental Difference Exists Between This People And All Others. It Claims Its People To Be Unique, Individual, Incompatible With All Others, And Denies Theoretically The Very Possibility Of A Common Mankind Long Before It Is Used To Destroy The Humanity Of Man.

Walter Benjamin Knew That The Break In Tradition And Loss Of Authority Which Occurred In His Lifetime Were Irreparable, And He Concluded That He Had To Discover New Ways Of Dealing With The Past. In This He Became A Master When He Discovered That The Transmissibility Of The Past Had Been Replaced By The Citability And That In Place Of Its Authority There Had Arisen A Strange Power To Settle Down, Piecemeal, In The Present And To Deprive It Of ‘peace Of Mind,’ The Mindless Peace Of Complacency.

The Most Radical Revolutionary Will Become A Conservative The Day After The Revolution.

Political Revolution

Revolutionary Leaders

... We Have Almost Succeeded In Leveling All Human Activities To The Common Denominator Of Securing The Necessities Of Life And Providing For Their Bundance. Whatever We Do, We Are Supposed To Do For The Sake Of "making A Living;" Such Is The Verdict Of Society, And The Number Of People, Especially In The Professions Who Might Challenge It, Has Decreased Rapidly. The Only Exception Society Is Willing To Grant Is To The Artist, Who, Strictly Speaking, Is The Only "worker" Left In A Laboring Society.

By Assigning His Political Rights To The State The Individual Also Delegates His Social Responsibilities To It: He Asks The State To Relieve Him Of The Burden Of Caring For The Poor Precisely As He Asks For Protection Against Criminals. The Difference Between Pauper And Criminal Disappears - Both Stand Outside Society.

The Totalitarian Attempt At Global Conquest And Total Domination Has Been The Destructive Way Out Of All Impasses. Its Victory May Coincide With The Destruction Of Humanity; Wherever It Has Ruled, It Has Begun To Destroy The Essence Of Man.

To Expect Truth To Come From Thinking Signifies That We Mistake The Need To Think With The Urge To Know.

Evil Thrives On Apathy And Cannot Exist Without It.

Our Last Will And Testament, Providing For The Only Future Of Which We Can Be Reasonably Certain, Namely Our Own Death, Shows Thatthe Will's Need To Will Is No Less Strong Than Reason's Need To Think; In Both Instances The Mind Transcends Its Own Natural Limitations, Either By Asking Unanswerable Questions Or By Projecting Itself Into A Future Which, For The Willing Subject, Will Never Be.

I'm More Than Ever Of The Opinion That A Decent Human Existence Is Possible Today Only On The Fringes Of Society, Where One Then Runs The Risk Of Starving Or Being Stoned To Death. In These Circumstances, A Sense Of Humor Is A Great Help.

If It Is True ... That No One Has A Life Worth Thinking About Whose Life Story Cannot Be Told, Does It Not Then Follow That Life Could Be, Even Ought To Be, Lived As A Story, That What One Has To Do In Life Is To Make The Story Come True?

There Exists In Our Society Widespread Fear Of Judging…[b]ehind The Unwillingness To Judge Lurks The Suspicion That No One Is A Free Agent, And Hence Doubt That Anyone Is Responsible Or Could Be Expected To Answer For What He Has Done…who Has Ever Maintained That By Judging A Wrong I Presuppose That I Myself Would Be Incapable Of Committing It?

Legends Have Always Played A Powerful Role In The Making Of History. ... Without Ever Relating Facts Reliably, Yet Always Expressing Their True Significance, They Offered A Truth Beyond Realities, A Remembrance Beyond Memories.

[about Eichmann:] 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.

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.

There Is All The Difference In The World Between The Criminal's Avoiding The Public Eye And The Civil Disobedience's Taking The Law Into His Own Hands In Open Defiance. This Distinction Between An Open Violation Of The Law, Performed In Public, And A Clandestine One Is So Glaringly Obvious That It Can Be Neglected Only By Prejudice Or Ill Will.

Entirely New Concepts Are Very Rare In Politics.

The More Dubious And Uncertain An Instrument Violence Has Become In International Relations, The More It Has Gained In Reputation And Appeal In Domestic Affairs, Specifically In The Matter Of Revolution.

The Ideal Subject Of Totalitarian Rule Is Not The Convinced Nazi Or The Dedicated Communist, But People For Whom The Distinction Between Fact And Fiction, True And False, No Longer Exists.

... The Loss Of Belief In Future States Is Politically, Though Certainly Not Spiritually, The Most Significant Distinction Betweenour Present Period And The Centuries Before. And This Loss Is Definite. For No Matter How Religious Our World May Turn Again, Or How Much Authentic Faith Still Exists In It, Or How Deeply Our Moral Values May Be Rooted In Our Religious Systems, The Fear Of Hell Is No Longer Among The Motives Which Would Prevent Or Stimulate The Actions Of A Majority.

Wherever The Relevance Of Speech Is At Stake, Matters Become Political By Definition, For Speech Is What Makes Man A Political Being.

If A Given Science Accidentally Reached Its Goal, This Would By No Means Stop The Workers In The Field, Who Would Be Driven Past Their Goal By The Sheer Momentum Of The Illusion Of Unlimited Progress.

The True Dividing Line Between People Is Whether They Are Capable Of Being In Love With Their Destiny.

Rage Is By No Means An Automatic Reaction To Misery And Suffering As Such; No One Reacts With Rage To An Incurable Disease Or To An Earthquake Or, For That Matter, To Social Conditions That Seem To Be Unchangeable. Only Where There Is Reason To Suspect That Conditions Could Be Changed And Are Not Does Rage Arise.

Slavery's Crime Against Humanity Did Not Begin When One People Defeated And Enslaved Its Enemies (though Of Course This Was Bad Enough), But When Slavery Became An Institution In Which Some Men Were 'born' Free And Others Slave, When It Was Forgotten That It Was Man Who Had Deprived His Fellow-men Of Freedom, And When The Sanction For The Crime Was Attributed To Nature.

The Fateful Equating Of Power With Violence, Of The Political With Government, And Of Government With A Necessary Evil Has Begun.

In Order To Go On Living One Must Try To Escape The Death Involved In Perfectionism.

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.

It Is A Secret From Nobody That The Famous Random Event Is Most Likely To Arise From Those Parts Of The World Where The Old Adage"there Is No Alternative To Victory" Retains A High Degree Of Plausibility.

The Cultural Treasures Of The Past, Believed To Be Dead, Are Being Made To Speak, In The Course Of Which It Turns Out That They Propose Things Altogether Different Than What Had Been Thought.

The History Of Humanity Is Not A Hotel Where Someone Can Rent A Room Whenever It Suits Him; Nor Is It A Vehicle Which We Board Or Get Out Of At Random. Our Past Will Be For Us A Burden Beneath Which We Can Only Collapse For As Long As We Refuse To Understand The Present And Fight For A Better Future. Only Then — But From That Moment On — Will The Burden Become A Blessing, That Is, A Weapon In The Battle For Freedom.

In Addition To The Conditions Under Which Life Is Given To Man On Earth, And Partly Out Of Them, Men Constantly Create Their Own, Self-made Conditions, Which, Their Human Origins Notwithstanding, Possess The Same Conditioning Power As Natural Things. Whatever Touches Or Enters Into A Sustained Relationship With Human Life Immediately Assumes The Character Of A Condition Of Human Existence. This Is Why Men, No Matter What They Do, Are Always Conditioned Beings. Whatever Enters The Human World Of Its Own Accord Or Is Drawn Into It By Human Effort Becomes Part Of The Human Condition.

While Strength Is The Natural Quality Of An Individual Seen In Isolation, Power Springs Up Between Men When They Act Together And Vanishes The Moment They Disperse.

If Men Were Ever To Lose The Appetite For Meaning We Call Thinking, They Would Lose The Capacity For Asking All The Unanswerable Questions Upon Which Every Civilization Is Founded.

Politically, The Weakness Of The Argument Has Always Been That Those Who Choose The Lesser Evil Forget Very Quickly That They Chose Evil.

Without Being Bound To The Fulfillment Of Promises, We Would Never Be Able To Keep Our Identities; We Would Be Condemned To Wanderhelplessly And Without Direction In The Darkness Of Each Man's Lonely Heart, Caught In Its Contradictions And Equivocalities--a Darkness Which Only The Light Shed Over The Public Realm Through The Presence Of Others, Who Confirm The Identity Between The One Who Promises And The One Who Fulfills, Can Dispel.

By Its Very Nature The Beautiful Is Isolated From Everything Else. From Beauty No Road Leads To Reality.

Expulsion And Genocide, Though Both Are International Offenses, Must Remain Distinct; The Former Is An Offense Against Fellow-nations, Whereas The Latter Is An Attack Upon Human Diversity As Such, That Is, Upon A Characteristic Of The "human Status" Without Which The Very Words "mankind" Or "humanity" Would Be Devoid Of Meaning.

Every Political Structure, New Or Old, Left To Itself Develops Stabilizing Forces Which Stand In The Way Of Constant Transformation And Expansion. Therefore All Political Bodies Appear To Be Temporary Obstacles When They Are Seen As Part Of An Eternal Stream Of Growing Power.

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 Young, Would Be Inevitable.

For The Possibilities Of Being Different From What One Is Are Infinite. Once One Has Negated Oneself, However, There Are No Longer Any Particular Choices.

Being Different

These Are The Fifties, You Know. The Disgusting, Posturing Fifties.

As Citizens, We Must Prevent Wrongdoing Because The World In Which We All Live, Wrong-doer, Wrong Sufferer And Spectator, Is At Stake.

Absence Of Thought Is Indeed A Powerful Factor In Human Affairs, Statistically Speaking The Most Powerful, Not Just In The Conduct Of The Many But In The Conduct Of All.

One Must Think With The Body And The Soul Or Not Think At All.

I'm Completely Against [feminism]. I Have No Desire To Give Up My Privileges.

... The Space Left To Freedom Is Very Small.ends Are Inherent In Human Nature And The Same For All.

Although Tyranny...may Successfully Rule Over Foreign Peoples, It Can Stay In Power Only If It Destroys First Of All The National Institutions Of Its Own People.

If The Ability To Tell Right From Wrong Should Turn Out To Have Anything To Do With The Ability To Think, Then We Must Be Able To "demand" Its Exercise From Every Sane Person, No Matter How Erudite Or Ignorant, Intelligent Or Stupid, He May Happen To Be. Kant In This Respect Almost Alone Among The Philosophers Was Much Bothered By The Common Opinion That Philosophy Is Only For The Few, Precisely Because Of Its Moral Implications.

To Act, In Its Most General Sense, Means To Take An Initiative, To Begin... To Set Something Into Motion.

Power Corresponds To The Human Ability Not Just To Act But To Act In Concert. Power Is Never The Property Of An Individual; It Belongs To A Group And Remains In Existence Only So Long As The Group Keeps Together. When We Say Of Somebody That He Is 'in Power' We Actually Refer To His Being Empowered By A Certain Number Of People To Act In Their Name. The Moment The Group, From Which The Power Originated To Begin With ... Disappears, 'his Power' Also Vanishes.

His [marx's] Most Explosive And Indeed Most Original Contribution To The Cause Of Revolution Was That He Interpreted The Compelling Needs Of Mass Poverty In Political Terms As An Uprising, Not For The Sake Of Bread Or Wealth, But For The Sake Of Freedom As Well.

Man's Chief Moral Deficiency Appears To Be Not His Indiscretions But His Reticence.

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.

Power Can Be Thought Of As The Never-ending, Self-feeding Motor Of All Political Action That Corresponds To The Legendary Unending Accumulation Of Money That Begets Money.

The Extreme Form Of Power Is All Against One, The Extreme Form Of Violence Is One Against All.

They Must Remember That They Are Constantly On The Run, And That The World's Reality Is Actually Expressed By Their Escape.

According To Bourgeois Standards, Those Who Are Completely Unlucky And Unsuccessful Are Automatically Barred From Competition, Which Is The Life Of Society. Good Fortune Is Identified With Honor, And Bad Luck With Shame.

Luck Serves ... As Rationalization For Every People That Is Not Master Of Its Own Destiny.

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

If This Practice [of Totalitarianism] Is Compared With […] [the Desert] Of Tyranny, It Seems As If A Way Had Been Found To Set The Desert Itself In Motion, To Let Loose A Sand Storm That Could Cover All Parts Of The Inhabited Earth. The Conditions Under Which We Exist Today In The Field Of Politics Are Indeed Threatened By These Devastating Sand Storms.

Men, Forever Tempted To Lift The Veil Of The Future-with The Aid Of Computers Or Horoscopes Or The Intestines Of Sacrificial Animals-have A Worse Record To Show In These Sciences Than In Almost Any Scientific Endeavor.

Under Conditions Of Terror, Most People Will Comply But Some People Will Not.

Freedom From Labor Itself Is Not New; It Once Belonged Among The Most Firmly Established Privileges Of The Few. In This Instance, It Seems As Though Scientific Progress And Technical Developments Had Been Only Taken Advantage Of To Achieve Something About Which All Former Ages Dreamed But Which None Had Been Able To Realize.

Only The Hypocrite Is Really Rotten To The Core.

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.

Exactly For The Sake Of What Is New And Revolutionary In Every Child, Education Must Be Conservative; It Must Preserve This Newness And Introduce It As A New Thing Into An Old World.

The Result Of A Consistent And Total Substitution Of Lies For Factual Truth Is Not That The Lie Will Now Be Accepted As Truth, And Truth Be Defamed As Lie, But That The Sense By Which We Take Our Bearings In The Real World - And The Category Of Truth Versus Falsehood Is Among The Mental Means To This End - Is Being Destroyed.

Men Who No Longer Can Make Sure Of The Reality Which They Feel And Experience Through Talking About It And Sharing It With Their Fellow-men, Live In The Same Nightmare Of Loneliness And Uncertainty Which, In A Normal World, Is The Terrible Fate Of Insanity.

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.

Thinking Beings Have An Urge To Speak, Speaking Beings Have An Urge To Think.

The Earth Is The Very Quintessence Of The Human Condition.

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.

There Is A Strange Interdependence Between Thoughtlessness And Evil.

Interdependence

The Trouble With Eichmann Was Precisely That So Many Were Like Him, And That The Many Were Neither Perverted Nor Sadistic, That They Were, And Still Are, Terribly And Terrifyingly Normal. From The Viewpoint Of Our Legal Institutions And Of Our Moral Standards Of Judgment, This Normality Was Much More Terrifying Than All The Atrocities Put Together.

Only The Mob And The Elite Can Be Attracted By The Momentum Of Totalitarianism Itself. The Masses Have To Be Won By Propaganda.

Promises Are The Uniquely Human Way Of Ordering The Future.

Keeping Promises

Broken Promises

Without Being Forgiven, Released From The Consequences Of What We Have Done, Our Capacity To Act Would, As It Were, Be Confined To One Single Deed From Which We Could Never Recover; We Would Remain The Victims Of Its Consequences Forever.

What I Propose, Therefore, Is Very Simple: It Is Nothing More Than To Think What We Are Doing

Poetry, Whose Material Is Language, Is Perhaps The Most Human And Least Worldly Of The Arts, The One In Which The End Product Remains Closest To The Thought That Inspired It.

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

... The Will Always Wills To Do Something And Thus Implicitly Holds In Contempt Sheer Thinking, Whose Whole Activity Depends On "doing Nothing.

We Have Almost Succeeded In Leveling All Human Activities To The Common Denominator Of Securing The Necessities Of Life And Providing For Their Abundance.

You Think That You Can Judge What's Good Or Evil From Whether You Enjoy Doing It Or Not. You Think That Evil Is What Always Appears In The Form Of A Temptation, While Good Is What You Never Spontaneously Want To Do. I Think This Is All Total Rubbish, If You Don't Mind My Saying So.

Courage Is Indispensible Because In Politics Not Life But The World Is At Stake.

Culture Relates To Objects And Is A Phenomenon Of The World; Entertainment Relates To People And Is A Phenomenon Of Life.

Men In Plural […] Can Experience Meaningfulness Only Because They Can Talk With And Make Sense To Each Other And Themselves.

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 .

Forgiveness Is The Only Way To Reverse The Irreversible Flow Of History.

No Punishment Has Ever Possessed Enough Power Of Deterrence To Prevent The Commission Of Crimes. On The Contrary, Whatever The Punishment, Once A Specific Crime Has Appeared For The First Time, Its Reappearance Is More Likely Than Its Initial Emergence Could Ever Have Been.

The Sad Truth Is That Most Evil Is Done By People Who Never Make Up Their Minds To Be Good Or Evil.

Action Painting Has To Do With Self-creation Or Self-definition Or Self-transcendence; But This Dissociates It From Self-expression, Which Assumes The Acceptance Of The Ego As It Is, With Its Wound And Its Magic.

No Cause Is Left But The Most Ancient Of All, The One, In Fact, That From The Beginning Of Our History Has Determined The Very Existence Of Politics, The Cause Of Freedom Versus Tyranny.

As Witnesses Not Of Our Intentions But Of Our Conduct, We Can Be True Or False, And The Hypocrite's Crime Is That He Bears False Witness Against Himself. What Makes It So Plausible To Assume That Hypocrisy Is The Vice Of Vices Is That Integrity Can Indeed Exist Under The Cover Of All Other Vices Except This One. 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.

For Politics Is Not Like The Nursery; In Politics Obedience And Support Are The Same.

The Way God Has Been Thought Of For Thousands Of Years Is No Longer Convincing; If Anything Is Dead, It Can Only Be The Traditional Thought Of God.

Total Loyalty Is Possible Only When Fidelity Is Emptied Of All Concrete Content, From Which Changes Of Mind Might Naturally Arise.

Goodness That Comes Out Of Hiding And Assumes A Public Role Is No Longer Good, But Corrupt In Its Own Terms And Will Carry Its Own Corruption Wherever It Goes.

There Always Comes A Point Beyond Which Lying Becomes Counterproductive. This Point Is Reached When The Audience To Which The Lies Are Addressed Is Forced To Disregard Altogether The Distinguishing Line Between Truth And Falsehood In Order To Be Able To Survive.

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 Dehumanize Them. And One Can Debate Long And Profitably On The Rule Of Nobody, Which Is What The Political Form Known As Bureau-cracy Truly Is….we Have Become Very Much Accustomed By Modern Psychology And Sociology, Not To Speak Of Modern Bureaucracy, To Explaining Away The Responsibility Of The Doer For His Deed In Terms Of This Or That Kind Of Determinism.

The Will To Power, As The Modern Age From Hobbes To Nietzsche Understood It, Far From Being A Characteristic Of The Strong, Is, Like Envy And Greed, Among The Vices Of The Weak, And Possibly Even Their Most Dangerous One. Power Corrupts Indeed When The Weak Band Together In Order To Ruin The Strong, But Not Before.

When Evil Is Allowed To Compete With Good, Evil Has An Emotional Populist Appeal That Wins Out Unless Good Men And Women Stand As A Vanguard Against Abuse.

We Are Wont To See Friendship Solely As A Phenomenon Of Intimacy In Which The Friends Open Their Hearts To Each Other Unmolested By The World And Its Demands...thus It Is Hard For Us To Understand The Political Relevance Of Friendship...but For The Greeks The Essence Of Friendship Consisted In Discourse...the Converse (in Contrast To The Intimate Talk In Which Individuals Speak About Themselves), Permeated Though It May Be By Pleasure In The Friend’s Presence, Is Concerned With The Common World.

Our Problem Today Is Not How To Expropriate The Expropriators But, Rather, How To Arrange Matters So That The Masses, Dispossessed By Industrial Society In Capitalist And Socialist Systems, Can Regain Property. For This Reason Alone, The Alternative Between Capitalism And Socialism Is False-not Only Because Neither Exists Anywhere In Its Pure State Anyhow, But Because We Have Here Twins, Each Wearing Different Hats.

The Presence Of Others Who See What We See And Hear What We Hear Assures Us Of The Reality Of The World And Ourselves.

The Right To Marry Whoever One Wishes Is An Elementary Human Right ... Even Political Rights, Like The Right To Vote, And Nearly All Other Rights Enumerated In The Constitution, Are Secondary To The Inalienable Human Rights To 'life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness' Proclaimed In The Declaration Of Independence; And To This Category The Right To Home And Marriage Unquestionably Belongs.

Pursuit Of Happiness

The Human Condition Comprehends More Than The Condition Under Which Life Has Been Given To Man. Men Are Conditioned Beings Because Everything They Come In Contact With Turns Immediately Into A Condition Of Their Existence. The World In Which The Vita Activa Spends Itself Consists Of Things Produced By Human Activities; But The Things That Owe Their Existence Exclusively To Men Nevertheless Constantly Condition Their Human Makers.

Economic Growth May One Day Turn Out To Be A Curse Rather Than A Good, And Under No Conditions Can It Either Lead Into Freedom Or Constitute A Proof For Its Existence.

No Punishment Has Ever Possessed Enough Power Of Deterrence To Prevent The Commission Of Crimes.

It Is Better To Suffer Wrong Than To Do Wrong, Because You Can Remain The Friend Of The Sufferer; Who Would Want To Be The Friend Of And Have To Live Together With A Murderer? Not Even Another Murderer.

Violence Can Destroy Power; It Is Utterly Incapable Of Creating It.

The Emotions I Feel Are No More Meant To Be Shown In Their Unadulterated State Than The Inner Organs By Which We Live.

Few Girls Are As Well Shaped As A Good Horse.

The New Always Happens Against The Overwhelming Odds Of Statistical Laws And Their Probability, Which For All Practical, Everyday Purposes Amounts To Certainty; The New Therefore Always Appears In The Guise Of A Miracle.

Every End In History Necessarily Contains A New Beginning.

For Excellence, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

A Functionary, When He Really Is Nothing More Than A Functionary, Is Really A Very Dangerous Gentleman.

A Life Spent Entirely In Public, In The Presence Of Others, Becomes, As We Would Say, Shallow. While It Retains Its Visibility, It Loses Its Quality Of Rising Into Sight From Some Darker Ground Which Must Remain Hidden If It Is Not To Lose Its Depth In A Very Real, Non-subjective Sense.

What I Cannot Live With May Not Bother Another Man's Conscience. The Result Is That Conscience Will Stand Against Conscience.

Factual Truth Is Always Related To Other People: It Concerns Events And Circumstances In Which Many Are Involved; It Is Established By Witnesses And Depends Upon Testimony; It Exists Only To The Extent That It Is Spoken About, Even If It Occurs In The Domain Of Privacy. It Is Political By Nature.

This Is The Precept By Which I Have Lived: Prepare For The Worst; Expect The Best; And Take What Comes.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

It Is Indeed My Opinion Now That Evil Is Never “radical,” That It Is Only Extreme, And That It Possess Neither Depth Nor Any Demonic Dimension. It Can Overgrow And Lay Waste The Whole World Precisely Because It Spreads Like Fungus On The Surface. It Is “thought-defying,” As I Said, Because Thought Tries To Reach Some Depth, To Go To The Roots, And The Moment It Concerns Itself With Evil, It Is Frustrated Because There Is Nothing. That Is Its “banality.” Only The Good Has Depth And Can Be Radical.

The Possible Redemption From The Predicament Of Irreversibility - Of Being Unable To Undo What One Has Done - Is The Faculty Of Forgiving.

The Chief Qualification Of A Mass Leader Has Become Unending Infallibility; He Can Never Admit An Error.

The Strength Of Even The Strongest Individual Can Always Be Overpowered By The Many, Who Often Will Combine For No Other Purpose Than To Ruin Strength Precisely Because Of Its Peculiar Independence.

If The Ability To Tell Right From Wrong Should Have Anything To Do With The Ability To Think, Then We Must Be Able To 'demand' Its Exercise In Every Sane Person No Matter How Erudite Or Ignorant.

Legitimacy, When Challenged, Bases Itself On An Appeal To The Past, While Justification Relates To An End That Lies In The Future. Violence Can Be Justifiable, But It Never Will Be Legitimate.

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.

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.

Fear Is An Emotion Indispensable For Survival.

Well, Demonization Itself Can Help ... To Provide An Alibi. You Succumb To The Devil Incarnate, And As A Result You're Not Guilty Yourself.

When An Old Truth Ceases To Be Applicable, It Does Not Become Any Truer By Being Stood On Its Head.

Kant ... Stated That He Had "found It Necessary To Deny Knowledge ... To Make Room For Faith," But All He Had "denied" Was Knowledge Of Things That Are Unknowable, And He Had Not Made Room For Faith But For Thought.

Action Without A Name, A Who Attached To It, Is Meaningless.

Ideas, As Distinguished From Events, Are Never Unprecedented.

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.

Action, As Distinguished From Fabrication, Is Never Possible In Isolation; To Be Isolated Is To Be Deprived Of The Capacity To Act.

To Speak Of The Impotence Of Power Is No Longer A Witty Paradox.

Where All Are Guilty, No One Is; Confessions Of Collective Guilt Are The Best Possible Safeguard Against The Discovery Of Culprits, And The Very Magnitude Of The Crime The Best Excuse For Doing Nothing.

In The Era Of Imperialism, Businessmen Became Politicians And Were Acclaimed As Statesmen, While Statesmen Were Taken Seriously Only If They Talked The Language Of Succcessful Businessmen.

There Will Always Be One Against All, One Person Against All Others. [this Is So] Not Because One Is Terribly Wise And All Are Terribly Foolish, But Because The Process Of Thinking And Researching, Which Finally Yields Truth, Can Only Be Accomplished By An Individual Person. In Its Singularity Or Duality, One Human Being Seeks And Finds – Not The Truth (lessing) –, But Some Truth.

What Is The Subject Of Our Thought? Experience! Nothing Else!

The Business Of Thinking ... Undoes Every Morning What It Had Finished The Night Before.

Under Conditions Of Tyranny It Is Far Easier To Act Than To Think.

The Chief Reason Warfare Is Still With Us Is Neither A Secret Death-wish Of The Human Species, Nor An Irrepressible Instinct Of Aggression, Nor, Finally And More Plausibly, The Serious Economic And Social Dangers Inherent In Disarmament, But The Simple Fact That No Substitute For This Final Arbiter In International Affairs Has Yet Appeared On The Political Scene.

... We May Remember What The Romansthought A Cultivated Person Ought To Be: One Who Knows How To Choose His Company Among Men, Among Things, Among Thoughts, In The Present As Well As In The Past.

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.

The End Of Rebellion Is Liberation, While The End Of Revolution Is The Foundation Of Freedom.

Philosophy Is Called Upon To Compensate For The Frustrations Of Politics And, More Generally, Of Life Itself.

This Inability To Think Created The Possibility For Many Ordinary Men To Commit Evil Deeds On A Gigantic Scale, The Like Of Which Had Never Been Seen Before. The Manifestation Of The Wind Of Thought Is Not Knowledge But The Ability To Tell Right From Wrong, Beautiful From Ugly. And I Hope That Thinking Gives People The Strength To Prevent Catastrophes In These Rare Moments When The Chips Are Down.

... Whatever Men Do Or Know Or Experience Can Make Sense Only To The Extent That It Can Be Spoken About. There May Be Truths Beyond Speech, And They May Be Of Great Relevance To Man In The Singular, That Is, To Man In So Far As He Is Not A Political Being, Whatever Else He May Be. Men In The Plural, That Is, Men In So Far As They Live And Move And Act In This World, Can Experience Meaningfulness Only Because They Can Talk With And Make Sense To Each Other And To Themselves.

Every Activity Performed In Public Can Attain An Excellence Never Matched In Privacy; For Excellence, By Definition, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

When We Were Told That By Freedom We Understood Free Enterprise, We Did Very Little To Dispel This Monstrous Falsehood. Wealth And Economic Well-being, We Have Asserted, Are The Fruits Of Freedom, While We Should Have Been The First To Know That This Kind Of Happiness Has Been An Unmixed Blessing Only In This Country, And It Is A Minor Blessing Compared With The Truly Political Freedoms, Such As Freedom Of Speech And Thought, Of Assembly And Association, Even Under The Best Conditions.

The Greatest Enemy Of Authority, Therefore, Is Contempt, And The Surest Way To Undermine It Is Laughter.

To Be Free In An Age Like Ours, One Must Be In A Position Of Authority. That In Itself Would Be Enough To Make Me Ambitious.

Nietzsche ... Has Caused [philosophers] So Much Confusion.

For The Lesson Of Such Stories [of Resistance To Nazi Atrocities] Is Simple And Within Everybody's Grasp. Politically Speaking, It Is That Under Conditions Of Terror, Most People Will Comply But Some People Will Not, Just As The Lesson Of The Countries To Which The Final Solution Was Proposed Is That "it Could Happen" In Most Places But It Did Not Happen Everywhere. Humanly Speaking, No More Is Required, And No More Can Reasonably Be Asked, For This Planet To Remain A Place Fit For Human Habitation.

The Ceaseless, Senseless Demand For Original Scholarship In A Number Of Fields, Where Only Erudition Is Now Possible, Has Led Either To Sheer Irrelevancy, The Famous Knowing Of More And More About Less And Less, Or To The Development Of A Pseudo-scholarship Which Actually Destroys Its Object.

The Rule Of Nobody ... Is What The Political Form Known As Bureaucracy Truly Is.

The Monstrous Sameness And Pervasive Ugliness So Highly Characteristic Of The Findings Of Modern Psychology, And Contrasting So Obviously With The Enormous Variety And Richness Of Overt Human Conduct, Witness To The Radical Difference Between The Inside And The Outside Of The Human Body.

Trending Author

Category