German-American political theorist and philosopher (1906–1975)
People connected to Hannah Arendt
She called it "the banality of evil" — the idea that ordinary people become cogs in totalitarian systems without grand malice, just obedience. That phrase, tied to her coverage of Adolf Eichmann's trial, made her one of the twentieth century's most influential political theorists and one of its most controversial.
Born to a Jewish family in Linden in 1906, Arendt lost her father at seven and grew up in a secular, politically progressive household. She studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg — where they began a romantic affair — and earned her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1929 under Karl Jaspers. In 1933 the Gestapo briefly imprisoned her for illegal research into antisemitism; she fled to Paris, worked helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, then escaped a French detention camp when Germany invaded and reached the United States in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 established…
Sourced, dated quotes from Hannah Arendt
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good?
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt.
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one.
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