Crises of the Republic Quotes

“... Half of politics is "image-making", the other half is the art of making people believe the image”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Image-making as global policy—not world conquest, but victory in the battle “to win the people’s minds”—is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.”
― Hannah Arendt , Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the "National Security Managers", as they have been recently called by Richard Barnet, who "exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and interpreting the outside world for him".”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Les spécialistes de la solution de problèmes ont quelque chose en commun avec les menteurs purs et simples: ils s'efforcent de se débarrasser des faits et son persuadés que la chose est possible du fait qu'il s'agit de réalites contingentes.
En vérité,on ne peut jamais y parvenir, que ce soit au moyen de la théorie ou par la manipulation de l'opinion publique- comme si, pour annuler une réalité, il suffisait qu'un nombre assez élevé de personnes soit persuadé de son inexistance. On ne peut y parvenir que par un acte de destruction radicale.”
― Hannah Arendt, Du Mensonge à la violence

“The fact is that the gap between state-owned means of violence and what people can muster by themselves—from beer bottles to Molotov cocktails and guns—has always been so enormous that technical improvements make hardly any difference. Textbook instructions on “how to make a revolution” in a step-by-step progression from dissent to conspiracy, from resistance to armed uprising, are all based on the mistaken notion that revolutions are “made.” In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only as long as the power structure of the government is intact—that is, as long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to use their weapons. When this is no longer the case, the situation changes abruptly. Not only is the rebellion not put down, but the arms themselves change hands—sometimes, as in the Hungarian revolution, within a few hours.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments. To claim, as is often done, that a tiny unarmed minority has successfully, by means of violence—shouting, kicking up a row, et cetera—disrupted large lecture classes whose overwhelming majority had voted for normal instruction procedures is therefore very misleading.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“War has, so to speak, become a luxury which only the small nations can still afford, and they only so long as they are not drawn into the spheres of influence of the great powers and do not possess nuclear weapons themselves.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“The disintegration processes which have become so manifest in recent years—the decay of public services: schools, police, mail delivery, garbage collection, transportation, et cetera; the death rate on the highways and the traffic problems in the cities; the pollution of air and water—are the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think;”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Pavel Kohout, a Czech author, writing in the heyday of the Czechoslovakian experiment with freedom, defined a “free citizen” as a “Citizen-Co-ruler.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“an increase in the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on the working class nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“the trouble was only that as soon as the workers had reached a satisfactory level of working and living conditions, they stubbornly refused to remain proletarians and play their revolutionary role.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),2 the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Behind the constantly repeated cliché of the “mightiest power on earth,” there lurked the dangerous myth of omnipotence.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“whatever an individual might secretly know or believe to be the truth is neatly illustrated by a medieval anecdote according to which a sentry, on duty to watch and warn the townspeople of the enemy’s approach, jokingly sounded a false alarm—and then was the last to rush to the walls to defend the town against his invented enemies. From this, one may conclude that the more successful a liar is, the more people he has convinced, the more likely it is that he will end by believing his own lies.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“no one at the top knew or considered it important that the Vietnamese had been fighting foreign invaders for almost 2,000 years,”63 or that the notion of Vietnam as a “tiny backward nation” without interest to “civilized” nations, which is, unhappily, often shared by the war critics, stands in flagrant contradiction to the very old and highly developed culture of the region.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Washington Post, was recorded in the “Special China Series,” documents issued by the State Department in August, 1969, but came to the notice of the public only when reported by Terence Smith in the New York Times. Mao and Chou En-lai, it turns out, approached President Roosevelt in January, 1945, “trying to establish relations with the United States in order to avoid total dependence on the Soviet Union” (italics added). It seems that Ho Chi Minh never received an answer, and information of the Chinese approach was suppressed because, as Professor Allen Whiting has commented, it contradicted “the image of monolithic Communism directed from Moscow.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Johnson administration and the only adviser who dared to break the taboo and recommend immediate withdrawal, had the courage to tell the President in 1965).”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“The feeling is that we are trying to impose some U.S. image on distant peoples we cannot understand . . . and we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths,” as McNaughton wrote in 1967.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Image-making as global policy—not world conquest, but victory in the battle “to win the people’s minds”—is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“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. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution

“Le système de gouvernement représentatif connaît aujourd'hui une crise en partie parce qu'il a perdu, avec le temps, toutes les institutions qui pouvaient permettre une participation effective des citoyens et, d'autre part, parce qu'il est gravement atteint par le mal qui affecte le système des partis: la bureaucratisation et la tendance des deux partis à ne représenter que leurs appareils.”
― Hannah Arendt, Du Mensonge à la violence