Quotes · Skopia

13 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Place·Konigsberg✕clear

Political literature

To 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.

The Origins of Totalitarianism · 1951

★ 5.3

Essay · Magazine · Political literature · Historical literature

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.

1963

★ 5.3

Political literature

The worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope.

The Origins of Totalinarianism · 1951

★ 3.8

Political literature · Philosophical literature

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

1969

★ 3.7

Political literature

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.

The Origins of Totalinarianism · 1951

★ 3.6

Political literature

The 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.

On Revolution · 1963

★ 3.6

Philosophical literature

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

On Violence · 1969

★ 3.6

Essay · Magazine · Political literature

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

The New Yorker · 1970

★ 3.6

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

1970

★ 3.6

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

The Human Condition · 1958

★ 2.0

Philosophical literature

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.

On Violence · 1969

★ 1.9

Philosophical literature

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

The Life of the Mind · 1975

★ 1.9

Essay · Magazine · Political literature

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

The New Yorker · 1970

★ 1.9