“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
“In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.”
— Hannah Arendt
“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.”
— Hannah Arendt
“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
— Hannah Arendt
“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed.”
— Hannah Arendt
“Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.”
— Hannah Arendt
“Most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
— Hannah Arendt
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
— Hannah Arendt
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
— Hannah Arendt
“Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.”
— Hannah Arendt
“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 it ends in power's disappearance.”
— Hannah Arendt
“Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”
— Hannah Arendt
“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”
— Hannah Arendt
“It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think. ”
— Hannah Arendt
“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 dehumanise them.”
— Hannah Arendt