Background Image

...

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.

-Hannah Arendt

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The History Of Humanity

Hannah Arendt

...

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.

Views: 59738

Topic

More From Hannah Arendt

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Scientific And Philosophic Truth Have Parted Company.

The Practice Of Violence, Like All Action, Changes The World, But The Most Probable Change Is A More Violent World.

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.

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

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

Political Revolution

Revolutionary Leaders

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.

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

... 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.

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

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

That Hegelian Dialectics Should Provide A Wonderful Instrument For Always Being Right, Because They Permit The Interpretations Of All Defeats As The Beginning Of Victory, Is Obvious. One Of The Most Beautiful Examples Of This Kind Of Sophistry Occurred After 1933 When The German Communists For Nearly Two Years Refused To Recognize That Hitler's Victory Had Been A Defeat For The German Communist Party.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

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.

Every Thought Is Strictly Speaking An After-thought.

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

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

Thought ... Is Still Possible, And No Doubt Actual, Wherever Men Live Under The Conditions Of Political Freedom. Unfortunately ... No Other Human Capacity Is So Vulnerable, And It Is In Fact Far Easier To Act Under Conditions Of Tyranny Than It Is To Think.

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

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.

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.

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

Generally Speaking, Violence Always Arises Out Of Impotence. It Is The Hope Of Those Who Have No Power.

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.

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

Imperialism Was Born When The Ruling Class In Capitalist Production Came Up Against National Limits To Its Economic Expansion.

Every End In History Necessarily Contains A New Beginning.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

The Third World Is Not A Reality But An Ideology.

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.

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

We Are Free To Change The World And Start Something New In It.

Changing The World

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 Point, As Marx Saw It, Is That Dreams Never Come True.

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.

If The World Is To Contain A Public Space, It Cannot Be Erected For One Generation And Planned For The Living Only; It Must Transcend The Life-span Of Mortal Men…. There Is Perhaps No Clearer Testimony To The Loss Of The Public Realm In The Modern Age Than The Almost Complete Loss Of Authentic Concern With Immortality, A Loss Somewhat Overshadowed By The Simultaneous Loss Of The Metaphysical Concern With Eternity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To Think And To Be Fully Alive Are The Same.

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.

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

There Is A Strange Interdependence Between Thoughtlessness And Evil.

Interdependence

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Violence Is An Expression Of Impotence.

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.

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.

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

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

For Excellence, The Presence Of Others Is Always Required.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Metaphysical Fallacies Contain The Only Clues We Have To What Thinking Means To Those Who Engage In It.

... 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.

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

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.

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

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

Thought And Action Must Never Part Company.

Thoughts And Actions

Plurality Of Languages: [...] It Is Crucial 1. That There Are Many Languages And That They Differ Not Only In Vocabulary, But Also In Grammar, And So In Mode Of Thought And 2. That All Languages Are Learnable.

Nihilism Is But The Other Side Of Conventionalism; Its Creed Consists Of Negations Of The Current So-called Positive Values, To Which It Remains Bound.

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.

The Only Grandeur Of Imperialism Lies In The Nation's Losing Battle Against It.

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

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.

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.

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 Possible Redemption From The Predicament Of Irreversibility──of Being Unable To Undo What One Has Done──is The Faculty Of Forgiving. The Remedy For Unpredictability, For The Chaotic Uncertainty Of The Future, Is Contained In The Faculty To Make And Keep Promises. Both Faculties Depend Upon Plurality, On The Presence And Acting Of Others, For No Man Can Forgive Himself And No One Can Be Bound By A Promise Made Only To Himself.

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.

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.

The Concept Of Unlimited Expansion That Alone Can Fulfill The Hope For Unlimited Accumulation Of Capital, And Brings About The Aimless Accumulation Of Power, Makes The Foundation Of New Political Bodies - Which Up To The Era Of Imperialism Always Had Been The Upshot Of Conquest - Well-nigh Impossible.

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.

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.

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.

Where Everybody Is Guilty, Nobody Is.

Only The Hypocrite Is Really Rotten To The Core.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

At Any Rate, Nothing Was More Characteristic Of Him [walter Benjamin] In The Thirties Than The Little Notebooks With Black Covers Which He Always Carried With Him And In Which He Tirelessly Entered In The Form Of Quotations What Daily Living And Reading Netted Him In The Way Of "pearls" And "coral." On Occasion He Read From Them Aloud, Showed Them Around Like Items From A Choice And Precious Collection.

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

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

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.

... 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.

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.

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

Fear Is An Emotion Indispensable For Survival.

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.

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

Storytelling Reveals Meaning Without Committing The Error Of Defining It.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

We All Carry Fault Within.

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.

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.

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.

Trending Author

Sherman Hemsley

Category