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Philosophical literature9 quotes
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. — Immanuel Kant · 1784There is... Only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. — Immanuel Kant · 1785The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim. — Hannah Arendt · 1969Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the motto of the Enlightenment. — Immanuel Kant · 1784The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world. — Hannah Arendt · 1969Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. — Immanuel Kant · 1788All 9 quotes →Political literature8 quotes
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963To abolish the fences of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man's liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom. — Hannah Arendt · 1951The worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. — Hannah Arendt · 1951The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim. — Hannah Arendt · 1969The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. 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. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. — Hannah Arendt · 1963The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. — Hannah Arendt · 1970All 8 quotes →Historical literature1 quote
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963