The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt Quotes

“From beyond the grave,
Hannah says that although living in the world of plurality and natality is no picnic, if we want to avoid Auschwitz or the Gulag or Stonewall or Pol Pot or Attica or ISIS, we as a species have no choice but to embrace it and endure it.

In other words, there is no single answer, no single bullet of understanding to guide us, just a glorious neverending mess. The neverending mess of true human freedom.”
― Ken Krimstein, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth

“For me, in the ashes, it’s not enough to describe what happened, but to focus unforgivingly on what actually happened, to provide a road map, a game plan for how hell happens, not just in Nazi Germany, but in Stalin’s Russia too.
Not surprisingly, since this is a new phenomenon, there is no word to describe it. So I have to make one up. The new force unleashed on the world is...Totalitarianism.
As fire lives on oxygen, the oxygen of totalitarianism is untruth.
Before totalitarian leaders can fit reality to their lies, their message is an unrelenting contempt for facts. They live by the belief that fact depends entirely on the power of the man who makes it up.”
― Ken Krimstein, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth

“If we turn Eichmann into a demonic monster, we somehow absolve him of his crime, and all of us of our potential crime, the crime of not thinking things through.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Ken Krimstein, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth