Quotes · Skopia

18 quotes

1784

★ 7.1

There 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

The Metaphysics of Morals · 1785

★ 5.3

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

1963

★ 5.3

Political literature

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

Hannah Arendt

The Origins of Totalinarianism · 1951

★ 3.8

Philosophical literature

Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the motto of the Enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant

What is Enlightenment? · 1784

★ 3.7

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

On Violence · 1969

★ 3.6

Essay · Magazine · Political literature

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

Hannah Arendt

The New Yorker · 1970

★ 3.6

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

Hannah Arendt

1970

★ 3.6

Philosophical literature

Two 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

Critique of Practical Reason · 1788

★ 2.0

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

Hannah Arendt

The Human Condition · 1958

★ 2.0

Philosophical literature

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

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

The New Yorker · 1970

★ 1.9

Philosophical literature

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Immanuel Kant

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals · 1785

★ 1.3

Sourced and curated.