8 Posts found for Author: Hannah Arendt

Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such … [ Read more ]

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Good & Evil, Politics & Public Policy

You can’t expect somebody who loves you to treat you less cruelly than he would treat himself.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Relationships

…for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. […] All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate … [ Read more ]

Authors: Hannah Arendt, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Insight, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology

Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company [but desire it and cannot find it].

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry

Society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subject: Life & Society