“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Hannah Arendt
“Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. ”
― Hannah Arendt
“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.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
“There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.”
― Hannah Arendt
“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yetand this is its horrorit can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
“... Half of politics is "image-making", the other half is the art of making people believe the image”
― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
Hannah Arendt
Education is a bitch.