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These aliens, these made-up worlds of ours, are ways of making mysteries mundane. We see beauty and think it truth. Man's measure grips the world, chokes meaning from it. But you can't escape cages by studying their bars. Laws prison licence in slow spaces, snagged time. So the best of science or of crafty fictive lies presses us into true darkness, away from the lamppost. Beware of the snaky swoop of integrals. Math's mad arabesques can conceal far more than they reveal. It's strangeness we must seek, not more urns so Greek, with their Pythagorean certainties. We must live in the jagged outlands, knowing truth may not fit snugly, can be ugly, and all our own."Bleak Velocities"
[..] it is becoming increasingly obvious, that the state is not based on men of strong spirit and natural power. It is increasingly based on the ignorance and passiveness of the people.
One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another. One day it will be realized that Socialism is not the invention of anything new, but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has grown.... We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.
You donât know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You donât know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!
The ruling ideology sees to it that subversive discoveries are trivialized and sterilized, after which they can be safely spectacularized.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of oneâs time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Shitting on a canvas and calling it experimental so it will mean something gives us some nice information about people, but no useful information about art.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
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.
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
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.
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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 possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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.
I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.
Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.
The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.
Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenon, and one characteristic of our modern mass age. It destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact that we are different by nature and by conviction. To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from Godlike certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap. A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria. In contrast to agreement, unanimity does not stop at certain well-defined objects, but spreads like an infection into every related issue.
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.
Laughter helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling oneâs soul to it.
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real worldâand the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this endâis being destroyed.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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.
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
Lies by their very nature have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.
When the facts come home to us, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into utopiasâimages, theories, or sheer follies.
We all grow up and inherit a certain vocabulary. We then have got to examine this vocabulary.
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake."Between Past and Future"
The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumersâ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment⊠To believe that such a society will become more âculturedâ as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumersâ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches."Between Past and Future"
Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power."Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution"
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."Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution"
All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them."Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution" (1972)
When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
[Justice] demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules.""Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural Ă©lite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality â as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"