Hannah Arendt Quotes

Hannah Arendt Quotes:

• "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."

• "No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."

• "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil."

• "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."

• "Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence."

• "When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."

Previous: Hannah Arendt: Thinking with an open heart, Arendt on Brecht, Hannah Arendt: A great American, Hannah Arendt: An intellectual for everyone, Hannah Arendt: Theorising totalitarianism
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