Hannah Arendt Quotes

“In some ways the book, Arendt’s majestic effort to penetrate beneath the horrors of her age, is a meditation on loneliness, on metaphysical rootlessness, on not belonging — a theme that resonates at least as powerfully now as it did then. In it, she tries to understand what she admits defies understanding: the demonic wish to make men superfluous to others and themselves.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“But mostly she intended the phrase to mark Eichmann as a specimen of the new “mass man,” a universal, postindustrial, semi-Marxian type who was characteristically lonely, rootless, socially adrift, economically expendable, and susceptible to both nihilism and authoritarianism.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“There are no monsters, except those set into the world by men.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“she would write poignantly in her last book, The Life of the Mind, published after her death in 1978: In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide. . . . Seen from the viewpoint of the spectators to whom [a human life] appears and from whose view it finally disappears, each individual life, its growth and decline, is a developmental process in which an entity unfolds itself in an upward movement until all its properties are fully exposed; this phase is followed by a period of standstill — its bloom or epiphany, as it were — which in turn is succeeded by the downward movement of disintegration that is terminated by complete disappearance.7”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“She completed The Origins of Totalitarianism in the fall of 1949.67 In some ways the book, Arendt’s majestic effort to penetrate beneath the horrors of her age, is a meditation on loneliness, on metaphysical rootlessness, on not belonging — a theme that resonates at least as powerfully now as it did then. In it, she tries to understand what she admits defies understanding: the demonic wish to make men superfluous to others and themselves.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“In “Totalitarianism,” the third and last section, she writes — soaringly and with biblical inflection —“It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” Chronic unemployment, inflation and punitive taxation, the debasement or suppression of a public forum for action and debate, the dislocation that comes from moving from nation to nation or job to job, the imposed inconsequence of innocence and guilt, in groups and out groups, the threat of terror — all tools of totalitarian dominance — seem to prepare victims and bullies alike to undervalue their lives.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“Blücher was wildly popular at Bard, earning commendations as a teacher and raises every year from 1952 until he taught his last class in 1969. He continued to have affairs throughout the 1950s and possibly the early 1960s, but it didn’t occur to Arendt to divorce him, “a practice she found absurdly American”
― Anne Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“[M]ass unanimity is not the result of agreement,” she wrote, “but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“Thoughtlessness” was the crime of which Arendt found Eichmann guilty in her book, and some of her finest late essays and lectures were explorations of what is meant by thought. Although a thinking self cannot take shape except in solitude, she mused, it must be a populated solitude. First, one has to think in dialogue with oneself and reach an agreement with oneself.”
― Anne Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“She is: Mountain of joy, sea of sorrow, Desert of desire, Dawn of arrival. Stranger: home of the one gaze Where the world begins.”
― Anne Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times