4 Quotes & Sayings By Hanna Arendt

Hanna Arendt was born in 1906 in Hannover, Germany. She spent her childhood years in Königsberg, where her parents managed a department store. Before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hanna was an avid reader and writer. As a teenager she ran away from home, traveled around Europe for two years, and returned to Königsberg to become a journalist Read more

When she refused to give up her communist beliefs, her father threatened to disown her if she did not enter into a marriage with the son of the Nazi mayor. She moved to Paris in 1937, where she joined the exiled German Communist Party and acquired French citizenship after the war. After World War II she wrote On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Her last book was Men in Dark Times: Essays and Dialogues, published posthumously.

1
It seems symbolic of this all-pervading unpredictability that those engaged in the perfection of the means of destruction have finally brought about a level of technical development where their aim, namely warfare, is on the point of disappearing altogether. Hanna Arendt
2
Th danger of exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its [worldview], is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think for the straight-jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power. Hanna Arendt
3
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. Hanna Arendt