Background Image

...

Predictions Of The Future Are Never Anything But Projections Of Present Automatic Processes And Procedures, That Is, Of Occurrences That Are Likely To Come To Pass If Men Do Not Act And If Nothing Unexpected Happens; Every Action, For Better Or Worse, And Every Accident Necessarily Destroys The Whole Pattern In Whose Frame The Prediction Moves And Where It Finds Its Evidence.

-Hannah Arendt

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Predictions Of The Future

Hannah Arendt

...

Predictions Of The Future Are Never Anything But Projections Of Present Automatic Processes And Procedures, That Is, Of Occurrences That Are Likely To Come To Pass If Men Do Not Act And If Nothing Unexpected Happens; Every Action, For Better Or Worse, And Every Accident Necessarily Destroys The Whole Pattern In Whose Frame The Prediction Moves And Where It Finds Its Evidence.

Views: 95077

Topic

More From Hannah Arendt

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.

... 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.

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

The Greater The Bureaucratization Of Public Life, The Greater Will Be The Attraction Of Violence. In A Fully Developed Bureaucracy There Is Nobody Left With Whom One Can Argue, To Whom One Can Represent Grievances, On Whom The Pressures Of Power Can Be Exerted. Bureaucracy Is The Form Of Government In Which Everybody Is Deprived Of Political Freedom, Of The Power To Act; For The Rule By Nobody Is Not No-rule, And Where All Are Equally Powerless We Have A Tyranny Without A Tyrant.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Aim Of Totalitarian Education Has Never Been To Instill Convictions But To Destroy The Capacity To Form Any.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Climax Of Terror Is Reached When The Police State Begins To Devour Its Own Children, When Yesterday's Executioner Becomes Today's Victim.

Promises Are The Uniquely Human Way Of Ordering The Future.

Keeping Promises

Broken Promises

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

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.

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.

Violence Can Always Destroy Power; Out Of The Barrel Of A Gun Grows The Most Effective Command, Resulting In The Most Instant And Perfect Obedience. What Never Can Grow Out Of It Is Power.

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.

Jefferson, Though The Secret Vote Was Still Unknown At The Time Had At Least A Foreboding Of How Dangerous It Might Be To Allow The People To Share A Public Power Without Providing Them At The Same Time With More Public Space Than The Ballot Box And With More Opportunity To Make Their Voices Heard In Public Than On Election Day. What He Perceived To Be The Mortal Danger To The Republic Was That The Constitution Had Given All Power To The Citizens, Without Giving Them The Opportunity Of Being Citizens And Of Acting As Citizens.

Thought And Action Must Never Part Company.

Thoughts And Actions

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.

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

Where Everybody Is Guilty, Nobody Is.

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.

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.

Ideological Thinking Becomes Emancipated From The Reality That We Perceive With Our Five Senses, And Insists On A 'truer' Reality Concealed Behind All Perceptible Things, Dominating Them From This Place Of Concealment And Requiring A Sixth Sense That Enables Us To Become Aware Of It.

What Really Distinguishes This Generation In All Countries From Earlier Generations ... Is Its Determination To Act, Its Joy In Action, The Assurance Of Being Able To Change Things By One's Own Efforts.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Clichés, Stock Phrases, Adherence To Conventional, Standardized Codes Of Expression And Conduct Have The Socially Recognized Function Of Protecting Us Against Reality.

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

In Politics, Love Is A Stranger, And When It Intrudes Upon It Nothing Is Being Achieved Except Hypocrisy.

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.

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.

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

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.

There Are No Dangerous Thoughts; Thinking Itself Is Dangerous.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It Interrupts Any Doing, Any Ordinary Activities, No Matter What They Happen To Be. All Thinking Demands A Stop-and-think.

Immortality Is What Nature Possesses Without Effort And Without Anybody's Assistance, And Immortality Is What The Mortals Must Therefore Try To Achieve If They Want To Live Up To The World Into Which They Were Born, To Live Up To The Things Which Surround Them And To Whose Company They Are Admitted For A Short While.

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.

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.

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.

It Is Obvious: If You Do Not Accept Something That Assumes The Form Of ‘destiny,’ You Not Only Change Its ‘natural Laws’ But Also The Laws Of The Enemy Playing The Role Of Fate.

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.

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.

Even Though We Have Lost Yardsticks By Which To Measure, And Rules Under Which To Subsume The Particular, A Being Whose Essence Is A Beginning May Have Enough Of Origin Within Himself To Understand Without Preconceived Categories And To Judge Without The Set Of Customary Rules Which Is Morality.

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

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.

If We Don't Know Our Own History, We Are Deemed To Live It.

The Conflict Between Art And Politics... Cannot And Must Not Be Solved.

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

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

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

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

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.

Every Thought Is Strictly Speaking An After-thought.

Bureaucracy, The Rule Of Nobody.

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.

There Is No Lasting Happiness Outside The Prescribed Cycle Of Painful Exhaustion And Pleasurable Regeneration, And Whatever Throws This Cycle Out Of Balance – Poverty And Misery Where Exhaustion Is Followed By Wretchedness Instead Of Regeneration, Or Great Riches And An Entirely Effortless Life Where Boredom Takes The Place Of Exhaustion And Where The Mills Of Necessity, Of Consumption And Digestion, Grind An Impotent Human Body Mercilessly And Barrenly To Death – Ruins The Elemental Happiness That Comes From Being Alive.

Lasting Happiness

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Opinions Are Formed In A Process Of Open Discussion And Public Debate, And Where No Opportunity For The Forming Of Opinions Exists, There May Be Moods -moods Of The Masses And Moods Of Individuals, The Latter No Less Fickle And Unreliable Than The Former -but No Opinion.

Poets Are The Only People To Whom Love Is Not Only A Crucial, But An Indispensable Experience, Which Entitles Them To Mistake It For A Universal One.

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

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.

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.

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.

Death Not Merely Ends Life, It Also Bestows Upon It A Silent Completeness, Snatched From The Hazardous Flux To Which All Things Human Are Subject.

Power Is Actualized Only When Word And Deed Have Not Parted Company.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

It Is My Contention That Civil Disobediences Are Nothing But The Latest Form Of Voluntary Association, And That They Are Thus Quite In Tune With The Oldest Traditions Of The Country.

In Contrast To Revenge, Which Is The Natural, Automatic Reaction To Transgression And Which, Because Of The Irreversibility Of The Action Process Can Be Expected And Even Calculated, The Act Of Forgiving Can Never Be Predicted; It Is The Only Reaction That Acts In An Unexpected Way And Thus Retains, Though Being A Reaction, Something Of The Original Character Of Action.

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

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.

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

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.

Thinking Withdraws Radically And For Its Own Sake From This World And Its Evidential Nature, Whereas Science Profits From A Possible Withdrawal For The Sake Of Specific Results.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Could The Activity Of Thinking As Such, The Habit Of Examining Whatever Happens To Come To Pass Or To Attract Attention, Regardless Of Results And Specific Content, Could This Activity Be Among The Conditions That Make Men Abstain From Evil-doing?

The Heritage Of The American Revolution Is Forgotten, And The American Government, For Better And For Worse, Has Entered Into Theheritage Of Europe As Though It Were Its Patrimony--unaware, Alas, Of The Fact That Europe's Declining Power Was Preceded And Accompanied By Political Bankruptcy, The Bankruptcy Of The Nation-state And Its Concept Of Sovereignty.

With The Rise Of Christianity, Faith Replaced Thought As The Bringer Of Immortality.

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.

There Is A Strange Interdependence Between Thoughtlessness And Evil.

Interdependence

Political Questions Are Far Too Serious To Be Left To The Politicians.

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.

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.

Psychologically Speaking, One May Say That The Hypocrite Is Too Ambitious; Not Only Does He Want To Appear Virtuous Before Others, He Wants To Convince Himself.

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.

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.

It Is A Society Of Laborers Which Is About To Be Liberated From The Ferrets Of Labor, And This Society Does No Longer Know Of Those Other Higher And More Meaningful Activities For The Sake Of Which This Freedom Would Deserve To Be Won.

Forgiveness Is The Key To Action And Freedom.

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.

Love, In Distinction From Friendship, Is Killed, Or Rather Extinguished, The Moment It Is Displayed In Public.

Friendship Love

Kant ... Was Also Quite Aware That "the Urgent Need" Of Reason Is Both Different From And "more Than Mere Quest And Desire For Knowledge." Hence, The Distinguishing Of The Two Faculties, Reason And Intellect, Coincides With A Distinction Between Two Altogether Different Mental Activities, Thinking And Knowing.

... 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.

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.

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

Culture Is Being Threatened When All Worldly Objects And Things, Produced By The Present Or The Past, Are Treated As Mere Functions For The Life Process Of Society, As Though They Are There Only To Fulfill Some Need, And For This Functionalization It Is Almost Irrelevant Whether The Needs In Question Are Of A High Or A Low Order.

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

Totalitarianism Is Never Content To Rule By External Means, Namely, Through The State And A Machinery Of Violence; Thanks To Its Peculiar Ideology And The Role Assigned To It In This Apparatus Of Coercion, Totalitarianism Has Discovered A Means Of Dominating And Terrorizing Human Beings From Within.

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

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.

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.

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.

Evil Thrives On Apathy And Cannot Exist Without It.

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

For Excellence, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

Scientific And Philosophic Truth Have Parted Company.

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.

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.

The Saving Grace Of All Really Great Gifts Is That The Persons Who Bear Their Burden Remain Superior To What They Have Done, At Least As Long As The Source Of Creativity Is Alive.

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

Every Organization Of Men, Be It Social Or Political, Ultimately Relies On Man's Capacity For Making Promises And Keeping Them.

Kant ... Discovered "the Scandal Of Reason," That Is The Fact That Our Mind Is Not Capable Of Certain And Verifiable Knowledge Regarding Matters And Questions That It Nevertheless Cannot Help Thinking About.

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.

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

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

It Is In The Very Nature Of A Beginning To Carry With Itself A Measure Of Complete Arbitrariness. Not Only Is It Not Bound Into A Reliable Chain Of Cause And Effect, A Chain In Which Each Effect Immediately Turns Into The Cause For Future Developments, The Beginning Has, As It Were, Nothing Whatever To Hold On To; It Is As Though It Came Out Of Nowhere In Either Time Or Space.

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.

Equality...is The Result Of Human Organization. We Are Not Born Equal.

Even In The Darkest Of Times We Have The Right To Expect Some Illumination, And ... Such Illumination May Well Come Less From Theories And Concepts Than From The Uncertain, Flickering, And Often Weak Light That Some Men And Women, In Their Lives And Their Works, Will Kindle Under Almost All Circumstances And Shed Over The Time-span That Was Given Them On Earth.

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.

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

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.

Predictions Of The Future Are Never Anything But Projections Of Present Automatic Processes And Procedures, That Is, Of Occurrences That Are Likely To Come To Pass If Men Do Not Act And If Nothing Unexpected Happens; Every Action, For Better Or Worse, And Every Accident Necessarily Destroys The Whole Pattern In Whose Frame The Prediction Moves And Where It Finds Its Evidence.

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.

Men Always Want To Be Terribly Influential, But I See That As Somewhat External. Do I Imagine Myself Being Influential? No. I Want To Understand. And If Others Understand--in The Same Sense That I Have Understood--that Gives Me A Sense Of Satisfaction, Like Feeling At Home.

Nothing We Use Or Hear Or Touch Can Be Expressed In Words That Equal What Is Given By The Senses.

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.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

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.

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

The Conviction That Everything That Happens On Earth Must Be Comprehensible To Man Can Lead To Interpreting History By Commonplaces.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

The Good Things In History Are Usually Of Very Short Duration, But Afterward Have A Decisive Influence On What Happens Over Long Periods Of Time.

The Earth Is The Very Quintessence Of The Human Condition.

The Individual Who Has Been Liberated By Reason Is Always Running Head-on Into A World, A Society, Whose Past In The Shape Of 'prejudices' Has A Great Deal Of Power; He Is Forced To Learn That Past Reality Is Also A Reality.

It Is In The Very Nature Of Things Human That Every Act That Has Once Made Its Appearance And Has Been Recorded In The History Of Mankind Stays With Mankind As A Potentiality Long After Its Actuality Has Become A Thing Of The Past.

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.

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.

If We Do Not Know Our Own History, We Are Doomed To Live It As Though It Were Our Private Fate.

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.

Kierkegaard, Marx, And Nietzsche Are For Us Like Guideposts To A Past Which Has Lost Its Significance.

No Argument Can Persuade Me To Like Oysters If I Do Not Like Them. In Other Words, The Disturbing Thing About Matters Of Taste Is That They Are Not Communicable.

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

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

The Touchstone Of A Free Act - From The Decision To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning Or Take A Walk In The Afternoon To The Highest Resolutions By Which We Bind Ourselves For The Future - Is Always That We Know That We Could Also Have Left Undone What We Actually Did.

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.

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.

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.

Basically We Are Always Educating For A World That Is Or Is Becoming Out Of Joint, For This Is The Basic Human Situation, In Which The World Is Created By Mortal Hands To Serve Mortals For A Limited Time As Home.

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

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

Individual Strength

Conscience Is The Anticipation Of The Fellow Who Awaits You If And When You Come Home.

Violence Is An Expression Of Impotence.

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

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?

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.

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

For No Matter What Learned Scientists May Say, Race Is, Politically Speaking, Not The Beginning Of Humanity But Its End, Not The Origin Of Peoples But Their Decay, Not The Natural Birth Of Man But His Unnatural Death.

Entirely New Concepts Are Very Rare In Politics.

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

Trending Author

Category