Men in Dark Times Quotes

“That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might 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 to them....”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. Whatever cannot become the object of discourse - the truly sublime, the truly horrible or the uncanny - may find human voice through which to sound into the world, but it is not exactly human. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Our political concepts, according to which we have to assume responsibility for all public affairs within our reach regardless of personal "guilt", because we are held responsible as citizens for everything that our government does in the name of the country, may lead us into an intolerable situation of global responsibility. The solidarity of mankind may well turn out to be an unbearable burden, and it is not surprising that the common reactions to it are political apathy, isolationist nationalism, or desperate rebellion against all powers that be rather than enthusiasm or a desire for a revival of humanism.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art...”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Well, neither vanity nor the need for adoration - the sad substitute for the supreme confirmation of one's existence which only love, mutual love, can give - belongs among the mortal sins; but they are unsurpassed prompters when we need suggestions for making fools of ourselves.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“all passions, even the most unpleasant, are as passions pleasant” because “they make us . . . more conscious of our existence, they make us feel more real.” This sentence strikingly recalls the Greek doctrine of passions, which counted anger, for example, among the pleasant emotions but reckoned hope along with fear among the evils. This evaluation rests on differences in reality, exactly as in Lessing; not, however, in the sense that reality is measured by force with which the passion affects the soul but rather by the amount of reality the passion transmits to it. In hope, the soul overleaps reality, as in fear it shrinks back from it. But anger, and above all Lessing’s kind of anger, reveals and exposes the world just as Lessing’s kind of laughter in Minna von Barnhelm seeks to bring about reconciliation with the world. Such laughter helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one’s soul to it. Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it. Not even the knowledge that man may be destroyed by the world detracts from the “tragic pleasure”.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe. Even where the world is still halfway in order, or is kept halfway in order, the public realm has lost the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature. More and more people in the countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world has regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, make use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and their obligations within it. This withdrawal from the world need not harm an individual; he may even cultivate great talents to the point of genius and so by a detour be useful to the world again. But with each such retreat an almost demonstrable loss to the world takes place; what is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Life may contain the "essence" (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the "elixir"; and eventually you may even be privileged to "make" something out of it, "to compound the story." But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat as such it will only play its tricks on you.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“No matter what form a world government with centralized power over the whole globe might assume, the very notion of one sovereign force ruling the whole earth, holding the monopoly of all means of violence, unchecked and uncontrolled by other sovereign powers, is not only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny, it would be the end of all political life as we know it. Political concepts are based on plurality, diversity, and mutual limitations. A citizen is by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory. Philosophy may conceive of the earth as the homeland of mankind and of one unwritten law, eternal and valid for all. Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality. The establishment of one sovereign world state, far from being the prerequisite for world citizenship, would be the end of all citizenship. It would not be the climax of world politics, but quite literally its end.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“We can no more master the past than we can undo it. But we can reconcile ourselves to it. The form for this is the lament, which arises out of all recollection.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns. When we think of dark times and of people living and moving in them, we have to take this camouflage, emanating from and spread by “the establishment”—or “the system,” as it was then called—also into account. If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by “credibility gaps” and “invisible government,” by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by "credibility gaps" and "invisible government" by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“a metaphor establishes a connection which is sensually perceived in its immediacy and requires no interpretation, while an allegory always proceeds from an abstract notion and then invents something palpable to represent it almost at will.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Vernunft (reason) is traced back to its origin in the verb vernehmen (to perceive, to hear),”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“the customary academic suspicion of anything that is not guaranteed to be mediocre need have been involved.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“The critic as an alchemist practicing the obscure art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, enduring gold of truth,”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“sui generis.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“it is rare to meet people who believe they possess the truth; instead, we are constantly confronted by those who are sure that they are right.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“But even non-tragic plots become genuine events only when they are experienced a second time in the form of suffering by memory operating retrospectively and perceptively.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“The fermenta cognitionis which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“from the human viewpoint 'sub specie aeternitatis' always means also 'sub specie mortis”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“it had been Christianity, after all, which brought into the dying world of classical antiquity the "good tidings" of the conquest of death. Whatever the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth meant originally, and however primitive Christianity may originally have understood his words, in the pagan world those tidings could mean only one thing: Your fears for the world, which you had thought eternal and for whose.. sake you had been able to reconcile yourselves to dying, are justified; the world is doomed, and its end is actually much closer than you think; but in recompense what you always thought of as the most transitory of all things, human life in its individual, personal particularity, will have no end. The world will die, but you will live.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“What Broch understood by kitsch (and who else before him had even looked into the question with the keenness and profundity it demands?) was by no means a simple matter of degeneracy. Nor did he think of the relation between kitsch and true art as comparable to that of superstition to religion in a religious age, or of pseudo-science to science in the modern mass age. Rather, for him kitsch is art, or art at once becomes kitsch as soon as it breaks out of the controlling value system. L'art pour l'art in particular, appearing though it did in aristocratic and haughty guise and furnishing us - as Broch of course knew - with such convincing works of literature, is actually already kitsch, just as in the commercial realm the slogan "Business is business" already contains within itself the dishonesty of the unscrupulous profiteer, and just as in the First World War the obtrusive maxim "War is war" had already transformed the war into mass slaughter.
There are several characteristic elements in this value philosophy of Broch's. It is not only that he defined kitsch as "evil in the value system of art." It is that he saw the criminal element and the element of radical evil as personified in the figure of the aestheticizing literary man (in which category, for instance, he placed Nero and even Hitler), and as one and the same with kitsch. Nor was this because evil revealed itself to the writer understandably first of all in his own "value system." Rather, it was because of his insight into the peculiar character of art and its enormous attraction for man. As he saw it, the real seductiveness of evil, the quality of seduction in the figure of the devil, is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon. Aesthetic in the broadest sense; the businessmen whose credo is "Business is business" and the statesmen who hold with 'War is war" are aestheticizing literati in the "value vacuum." They are aesthetes insofar as they are enchanted by the consonance of their own system, and they become murderers because they are prepared to sacrifice everything to this consonance, this "beautiful" consistency.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“El ámbito público ha perdido el poder de iluminación que formaba parte de su naturaleza original. En los países del mundo occidental, en el que, desde el declive del mundo antiguo, se ha considerado la de emanciparse de la política como una de las libertades básicas, un número cada vez mayor de personas hace uso de esa libertad y se apartan del mundo y de sus obligaciones en él [...]. Pero con cada uno de esos abandonos se le inflige al mundo una pérdida casi demostrable: lo que se pierde es el compromiso específico y, habitualmente, irreemplazable que debería haberse formado entre el individuo y sus prójimos.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times