60 quotes
In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.
Love and Saint Augustine (1929)
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
The Life of the Mind (1978)
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
Men in Dark Times (1968)
Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
The Human Condition (1958)
Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The Life of the Mind (1978)
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.
The Human Condition (1958)
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
A bad conscience does not necessarily signify a bad character.
There are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous.
Hitler never intended to defend ‘the West’ against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
Crises of the Republic (1969)