The Portable Hannah Arendt Quotes

“You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine questions. 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.”
― Peter Baehr, The Portable Hannah Arendt

“Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? (...) During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of “the battle destiny for the German people” [der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes], coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated.”
― Peter Baehr, The Portable Hannah Arendt

“The matter of merely laboring and consuming is of crucial importance for the reason that a kind of worldlessness defines itself there too. Nobody cares any longer what the world looks like.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt

“I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt