The Wisdom Letter #173

5 quotes from Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

✹ For today's Wisdom Letter, we have carefully curated five bite-sized quotes from the German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975).

Quote № 01:

“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.”

— Hannah Arendt

Quote № 02:

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

— Hannah Arendt

Quote № 03:

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed.”

— Hannah Arendt

Quote № 04:

“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.”

— Hannah Arendt

Quote № 05:

“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

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✺ Today’s Questions

Three philosophical questions to foster your curiosity:

Question № 01:

If power and violence are opposites, why does violence often emerge as a means to gain or sustain power, and what does this suggest about the fragility of true power?

Question № 02:

To what extent does the fabrication of facts undermine human autonomy and the ability to make informed moral and political decisions?

Question № 03:

How does the absence of a free press enable the rise of authoritarian regimes, and what responsibilities do journalists and citizens have in preserving the freedom to access information?

✽ Thank you for reading today’s Wisdom Letter.

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