Extended excerpt [Lecture]:

“Still, though unknown to the person, action is intensely personal. Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless whereas an art work retains its relevance whether or not we know the master’s name. Let me remind you of the monuments to the Unknown Soldier after World War I. They bear testimony to the need for finding a “who,” an identifiable somebody, whom four years of mass slaughter should have revealed. The unwillingness to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was actually Nobody inspired the erection of monuments to the unknown ones – that is to all those whom the war had failed to make known, robbing them thereby, not of their achievement, but of their human dignity.” (p. 13)

Source link: “Labor, Work, Action” (10 November 1964) online via Library of Congress: https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mharendt_pub&fileName=05/051810/051810page.db&recNum=12&itemLink=%2Fammem%2Farendthtml%2FmharendtFolderP05.html&linkText=7

Extended excerpt: [Arendt is summarizing key ideas on imagination in Isak Dinesen’s work, including her novel Out of Africa.]:

“Without repeating life in imagination you can never be fully alive, “lack of imagination” prevents people from “existing.” “Be loyal to the story,” as one of her storytellers admonishes the young, “be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story,” means no less than, Be loyal to life, don’t create fiction but accept what life is giving you, show yourself worthy of whatever it may be by recollecting and pondering over it, thus repeating it in imagination: this is the way to remain alive.” (p. 97)

Source note: Isak Dinesen is the pen name of Danish author Karen Blixen.

Source: Library – Men in Dark Times (1968|1995 Harvest Book) International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

0-15-658890-0

Extended excerpt  [Magazine essay]:

“Human life, because it is set off by a beginning and an end, becomes whole – an entity in itself, which can be subjected to judgment – only when it has ended in death; death not merely ends life but also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.” (p. 173) 

Source link: “Thinking III” (5 December 1977) online via The New Yorker [subscription service]: http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1977-12-05#folio=172

Extended excerpt  [Essay. Arendt is referring to the court-ordered integration of African American students into the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Like many Americans, Arendt had seen the photos & news video of white adults – and their children – verbally & physically abusing the “Little Rock Nine” as they walked into the school.]:

“The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?” (p. 50)

Source note: “Reflections on Little Rock” was originally commissioned by Commentary magazine, but after they hesitated to print the essay in 1958 Arendt withdrew it from the magazine. It was eventually published in Dissent in the fall of 1959.

Source link: “Reflections on Little Rock” (written 1958|published Winter 1959) in Dissent; online via Dissent [subscription service]: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reflections-on-little-rock

Extended excerpt [Non-fiction – Chapter two: ‘The Totalitarian Movement’]:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” (p. 80)

Source note: Totalitarianism is the third book of Arendt’s three Origins of Totalitarianism series.  Although all three segments have been printed in a single volume, this cited edition does not include the first & second books.

Source link:Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/80/mode/2up/search/incomprehensible+world

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction – Chapter one: ‘The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie’]:

“When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and “thought in continents,” these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs.” (p. 18)

Source: Library – Imperialism (1951|1994 Harvest Books) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-15-644200-0

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction]:

“Unfortunately, and contrary to what is currently assumed about the proverbial ivory-tower independence of thinkers, no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.” (p. 406) 

Source link: The Human Condition (1958|1998 U of Chicago 2nd ed., eBook) online via Scribd [subscription service]: https://www.scribd.com/read/189516561/The-Human-Condition-Second-Edition#Search_search-menu_538554

Extended excerpt [Essay. Italicized words as they appear in the cited source.]:

“It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.” (p. 9)

Source note: The original New York Review of Books print edition volume, issue, and article page numbers were not included in the magazine’s March 2018 online edition cited here.

Source link: “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (18 November 1971) online via The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/11/18/lying-in-politics-reflections-on-the-pentagon-pape/

Extended excerpt: [From Arendt’s introduction to her book, On Revolution]

“In a constellation that poses the threat of total annihilation through war against the hope for the emancipation of all mankind through revolution – leading one people after the other in swift succession “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them” – 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.” (p. 1) 

Source link: Library – On Revolution (1963|April 1973 13th printing) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/onrevolution00aren#page/n9/mode/2up/search/No+cause+is+left

Extended excerpt [Non-fiction – First line of chapter two: ‘The Totalitarian Movement’]:

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda. Under conditions of constitutional government and freedom of opinion, totalitarian movements struggling for power can use terror to a limited extent only and share with other parties the necessity of winning adherents and of appearing plausible to a public which is not yet rigorously isolated from all other sources of information.” (p. 39)

Source link: Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/38/mode/2up/search/Only+the+mob+and+the+elite

Extended excerpt  [Essay]:

“To sum up: politically speaking, it is not enough to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant.”

Source link: “Reflections on Violence” (27 February 1969) online via The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/02/27/a-special-supplement-reflections-on-violence/

Extended excerpt  [Essay]:

“Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. And since the predictability of the future can never be absolute, promises are qualified by two essential limitations. We are bound to keep our promises provided that no unexpected circumstances arise, and provided that the mutuality inherent in all promises is not broken.” (p. 101)

Source link: “Reflections: Civil Disobedience” (12 September 1970) online via The New Yorker [subscription service]: http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1970-09-12#folio=100

Extended excerpt  [Essay. Arendt was discussing the power of student anti-war protests in 1971.]:

“At the moment, one prerequisite for a coming revolution is lacking: a group of real revolutionaries. Just when the students on the left would most like to be – revolutionaries – that is just what they are not. Nor are they organized as revolutionaries: they have no inkling of what power means, and if power were lying in the street and they knew it was lying there, they are certainly the last to be ready to stoop down and pick it up. That is precisely what revolutionaries do. Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”

Source link: “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution” (22 April 1971) online via The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/04/22/thoughts-on-politics-and-revolution/

Extended excerpt  [Essay]:

“It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the “day of judgment.”

Source link: “Isak Dinesen: 1885-1963” (1969 ) Men in Dark Times; online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/menindarktimes00aren#page/104/mode/2up/search/reveals+meaning

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction]:

“To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” (p. 45)

Source note: An abbreviated version of Arendt’s “On Violence” was published in the 27 February 1969 edition of The New York Review of Books. That version – published under the title “Reflections on Violence” – did not include the quote cited here.

Source: Library – On Violence (1969|1970 Harvest Book ed.) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-0-15-669500-8

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction – Chapter four: ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’]:

“Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (p. 172)

Source link: Library – Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/172/mode/2up/search/ideal+subject+of+totalitarian+rule

Extended excerpt [Essay]:

“In other words, we are left with Plato’s “noble natures,” with the few of whom it may be true that none “does evil voluntarily.” Yet the implied and dangerous conclusion “Everybody wants to do good” is not true even in their case. (The sad truth of that matter is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.)” (p. 185)

Source link: “Thinking III” (5 December 1977) online via The New Yorker [subscription service]: http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1977-12-05#folio=184

Extended excerpt [Arendt, describing Adolf Eichmann and the other Nazi officers who were put on trial for their role in the mass murder of civilians before & during World War II. Arendt was present during the Jerusalem trials, and her reports and analysis was widely read around the world. Eichmann was found guilty on 15 December 1961 and executed at midnight on May 31/June 1, 1962.]:

“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, for it implied – as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels – that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.”

(p. 276)

Source: Library – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963|1964 Viking Press revised ed.) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 908784640

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction – Chapter one: ‘A Classless Society’]:

“Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. The totalitarian movements, each in its own way, have done their utmost to get rid of the party programs which specified concrete content and which they inherited from earlier, nontotalitarian stages of development.” (p. 22)

Source link: Library – Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/22/mode/2up/search/total+loyalty+is

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction – Chapter two: ‘The Totalitarian Movement’]:

“The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” (p. 80)

Source note: Totalitarianism is the third book of Arendt’s three Origins of Totalitarianism series.  Although all three segments have been printed in a single volume, the cited edition does not include the first & second books.

Source link:Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/80/mode/2up/search/correct+psychological+assumption

Extended excerpt: [Non-fiction – Chapter one: ‘A Classless Society’]

“Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” (p. 37)

Source link: Library – Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/36/

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction – Chapter one: ‘A Classless Society’]:

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between the rulers and the ruled and achieves a condition in which power and the will to power, as we understand them, play no role, or at best, a secondary role.” (p. 23)

Source note: Totalitarianism is the third book of Arendt’s three Origins of Totalitarianism series.  Although all three segments have been printed in a single volume, the cited edition does not include the first & second books.

Source link:Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/22/mode/2up/search/never+content+to+rule

Extended excerpt  [Essay]:

“To sum up: politically speaking, it is not enough to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”

Source link: “Reflections on Violence” (27 February 1969) online via The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/02/27/a-special-supplement-reflections-on-violence/

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction – Chapter four: ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’]:

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. (p. 176)

Source link: Library – Totalitarianism (1951)|1968 Harvest Books) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/totalitarianism00aren#page/176/mode/2up/search/masses+of+our+century