“There are many great authors of the past who have survived - TopicsExpress



          

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.” - Hannah Arendt, German-American political theorist and author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condition,” who was born 14 October 1906. Some quotes from the work of Hannah Arendt: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.” “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.” “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.” “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” “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.” “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time” “The common prejudice that love is as common as ‘romance’ may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.” “Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. ” “Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.” “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.” “Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because 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.” “The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.” “And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.” “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.” “Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” “When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ” “The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.” “The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object. ”
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 12:33:03 +0000

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