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Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian-born Christian anarchist, author, polymath, and polemicist.

Quotes

 * People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
 * Tools for Conviviality (1973), p. 10

 * In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
 * Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ch. 3

 * The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile. The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.
 * "Energy and Equity" (1974)

 * Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us. Just before He started out on His public life, Jesus went to the desert. He fasted, and after 40 days he was hungry. At this point the diabolos, appeared to tempt Him. First he asked Him to turn stone into bread, then to prove himself in a magic flight, and finally the devil, diabolos, "divider," offered Him power. Listen carefully to the words of this last of the three temptations: (Luke 4,6:) "I give you all power and glory, because I have received them and I give them to those whom I choose. Adore me and the power will be yours." It is astonishing what the devil says: I have all power, it has been given to me, and I am the one to hand it on — submit, and it is yours. Jesus of course does not submit, and sends the devilcumpower to Hell. Not for a moment, however, does Jesus contradict the devil. He does not question that the devil holds all power, nor that this power has been given to him, nor that he, the devil, gives it to whom he pleases. This is a point which is easily overlooked. By his silence Jesus recognizes power that is established as "devil" and defines Himself as The Powerless. He who cannot accept this view on power cannot look at establishments through the spectacle of the Gospel. This is what clergy and churches often have difficulty doing. They are so strongly motivated by the image of church as a "helping institution" that they are constantly motivated to hold power, share in it or, at least, influence it.
 * The Educational enterprise in the Light of the Gospel (13 November 1988)

 * Churches also have their problems with a Jesus whose only economics are jokes. A savior undermines the foundations of any social doctrine of the Church. But that is what He does, whenever He is faced with money matters. According to Mark 12:13 there was a group of Herodians who wanted to catch Him in His own words. They ask "Must we pay tribute to Caesar?" You know His answer: "Give me a coin – tell me whose profile is on it!." Of course they answer "Caesar's." The drachma is a weight of silver marked with Caesar's effigy. A Roman coin was no impersonal silver dollar; there was none of that "trust in God" or adornment with a presidential portrait. A denarius was a piece of precious metal branded, as it were, like a heifer, with the sign of the personal owner. Not the Treasury, but Caesar coins and owns the currency. Only if this characteristic of Roman currency is understood, one grasps the analogy between the answer to the devil who tempted Him with power and to the Herodians who tempt Him with money. His response is clear: abandon all that which has been branded by Caesar; but then, enjoy the knowledge that everything, everything else is God's, and therefore is to be used by you. The message is so simple: Jesus jokes about Caesar. He shrugs off his control. And not only at that one instance… Remember the occasion at the Lake of Capharnaum, when Peter is asked to pay a twopenny tax. Jesus sends him to throw a line into the lake and pick the coin he needs from the mouth of the first fish that bites. Oriental stories up to the time of Thousand Nights and One Night are full of beggars who catch the fish that has swallowed a piece of gold. His gesture is that of a clown; it shows that this miracle is not meant to prove him omnipotent but indifferent to matters of money. Who wants power submits to the Devil and who wants denarri submits to the Caesar.
 * The Educational enterprise in the Light of the Gospel (13 November 1988)

 * Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.
 * "Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb" NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 11, Issue 1 (Winter 1994)

Deschooling Society (1971)

 * Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education — and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.
 * Introduction (November 1970)

 * I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.
 * Introduction (November 1970)

 * Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
 * Ritualization of Progress

 * To the primitive the world was governed by fate, fact, and necessity. By stealing fire from the gods, Prometheus turned facts into problems, called necessity into question, and defied fate. Classical man framed a civilized context for human perspective. He was aware that he could defy fate-nature-environment, but only at his own risk. Contemporary man goes further; he attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.
 * Rebirth of Epimethean Man

Medical Nemesis (1976)

 * Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

 * The prestige of a puny national team in the medical Olympics is used to intensify a nationwide addiction to therapeutic relationships that are pathogenic on a level much deeper than mere medical vandalism. More health damage is caused by people's belief that they cannot cope with their illness unless they call on the doctor than doctors could ever cause by foisting their ministrations on people.

Silence is a Commons (1982)

 * Address at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The computer-managed Society," Tokyo, Japan (21 March 1982); as published in The CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983)

 * Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to "communicate" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use. The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

 * Electronic management as a political issue can be approached in several ways. I propose, at the beginning of this public consultation, to approach the issue as one of political ecology. Ecology, during the last ten years, has acquired a new meaning. It is still the name for a branch of professional biology, but the term now increasingly serves as the label under which a broad, politically organized general public analyzes and influences technical decisions.

 * I will clarify a distinction that I consider fundamental to political ecology. I shall distinguish the environment as commons from the environment as resource. On our ability to make this particular distinction depends not only the construction of a sound theoretical ecology, but also — and more importantly — effective ecological jurisprudence.

 * "Commons" is an Old English word. According to my Japanese friends, it is quite close to the meaning that iriai still has in Japanese. "Commons," like iriai, is a word which, in preindustrial times, was used to designate certain aspects of the environment. People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households. The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal plants in the forest. An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighbouring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church — and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about commons, iriai, they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community's survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.

 * The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order: Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the environment. Before, in any juridical system, most of the environment had been considered as commons from which most people could draw most of their sustenance without needing to take recourse to the market. After enclosure, the environment became primarily a resource at the service of "enterprises" which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed nature into the goods and services on which the satisfaction of basic needs by consumers depends. This transformation is in the blind spot of political economy.

 * The appropriation of the grassland by the lords was challenged, but the more fundamental transformation of grassland (or of roads) from commons to resource has happened, until recently, without being subjected to criticism. The appropriation of the environment by the few was clearly recognized as an intolerable abuse. By contrast, the even more degrading transformation of people into members of an industrial labour force and into consumers was taken, until recently, for granted. For almost a hundred years the majority of political parties has challenged the accumulation of environmental resources in private hands. However, the issue was argued in terms of the private utilization of these resources, not the distinction of commons. Thus anticapitalist politics so far have bolstered the legitimacy of transforming commons into resources.

 * Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure undermines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent — "ei-ei schau-schau!!!" — to provide for its own survival. People become economic individuals that depend for their survival on commodities that are produced for them. Fundamentally, most citizens' movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally induced redefinition of people as consumers.

 * As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

 * The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads — commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

 * A transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far. It needs to be recognized if we are to organize defense movements of what remains of the commons. This defense constitutes the crucial public task for political action during the eighties. The task must be undertaken urgently because commons can exist without police, but resources cannot. Just as traffic does, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms. By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency.

We the People interview (1996)

 * Online transcript

 * During the late sixties I had a chance to give a dozen addresses to people who were concerned with education and schooling. I asked myself, since when are people born needy? In need, for instance, of education? Since when do we have to learn the language we speak by being taught by somebody? I wanted to find out where the idea came from that all over the world people have to be assembled in specific groups of not less than fifteen, otherwise it's not a class, not more than forty, otherwise they are underprivileged, for yearly, not less than 800 hours, otherwise they don't get enough, not more than 1,100 hours, otherwise it's considered a prison, for four-year periods by somebody else who has undergone this for a longer time. How did it come about that such a crazy process like schooling would become necessary? Then I realized that it was something like engineering people, that our society doesn't only produce artifact things, but artifact people. And that it doesn't do that by the content of the curriculum, but by getting them through this ritual which makes them believe that learning happens as a result of being taught; that learning can be divided into separate tasks; that learning can be measured and pieces can be added one to the other; that learning provides value for the objects which then sell in the market. And it's true. The more expensive the schooling of a person, the more money he will make in the course of his life. This in spite of the certainty, from a social science point of view, that there's absolutely no relationship between the curriculum content and what people actually do satisfactorily for themselves or society in life.

 * The latent function of schooling, that is, the hidden curriculum, which forms individuals into needy people who know that they have now satisfied a little bit of their needs for education, is much more important... The idea that people are born with needs, that needs can be translated into rights, that these rights can be translated into entitlements, is a development of the modem world and it's reasonable, it's acceptable, it's obvious only for people who have had some of their educational needs awakened or created, then satisfied, and then learned that they have less than others. Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.

 * Increasingly people live in an artifact and become artifacts themselves, feel satisfied, feel fit for that artifact insofar as they themselves have been manipulated.

 * Inevitably modern technology has polarized society. It has polluted the environment. It has disabled very simple native abilities and made people dependent on objects... Like an automobile which makes the world inaccessible, when actually in Latin "automobile" means "using your feet to get somewhere." The automobile makes it unthinkable. I was recently told, "You're a liar!" when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.

 * Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."

 * The two of us haven't seen each other for a year now, and when we saw each other we bowed in front of each other. This very idea of bowing — you don't bow in front of a screen. It's made impossible, or very difficult, for people who constantly see non-persons on the screen.

 * I want to just go back to a great rabbinical and also, as you see, monastic, Christian development beyond what the Greeks like Plato or Cicero already knew about friendship. That it is from your eye that I find myself. There's a little thing there. They called it pupilla, a "puppet" of myself which I can see in your eye. The black thing in your eye. Pupil, puppet, person, eye. It is not my mirror. It is you making me the gift of that which Ivan is for you. That's the one who says "I" here. I'm purposely not saying, this is my person, this is my individuality, this is my ego. No. I'm saying this is the one who answers you here, whom you have given to him.

 * I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, as we say today, distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me.

 * Friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue, meaning here, "the habitual facility of doing the good thing," which is fostered by what the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was a political life in which I wouldn't have liked to participate, with the slaves around and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived of friendship as a supreme flowering, of the interaction which happens in a good political society.

 * I do not believe that friendship today can flower out — can come out — of political life. I do believe that if there is something like a political life to be — to remain for us, in this world of technology — then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I-and-you and, I hope, a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is.

 * While once friendship in our western tradition was the supreme flower of politics, I think that if community life exists at all today, it is in some way the consequence of friendship cultivated by each one who initiates it. This goes beyond anything which people usually talk about, saying each one of you is responsible for the friendships he/she can develop, because society will only be as good as the political result of these friendships.

 * Here is the right word. Hospitality was a condition consequent on a good society in politics, politaea, and by now might be the starting point of politaea, of politics. But this is difficult because hospitality requires a threshold over which I can lead you — and TV, internet, newspaper, the idea of communication, abolished the walls and therefore also the friendship, the possibility of leading somebody over the door. Hospitality requires a table around which you can sit and if people get tired they can sleep. You have to belong to a subculture to say, we have a few mattresses here. It's still considered highly improper to conceive of this as the ideal moments in a day or a year. Hospitality is deeply threatened by the idea of personality, of scholastic status. I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.

 * This breaking of the limitations of hospitality to a small in-group, of offering it to the broadest possible in-group, and saying, you determine who your guest is, might be taken as the key message of Christianity. Then in the year 300 and something, finally the Church got recognition. The bishops were made into something like magistrates. The first things those guys do, these new bishops, is create houses of hospitality, institutionalizing what was given to us as a vocation by Jesus, as a personal vocation, institutionalizing it, creating roofs, refuges, for foreigners. Immediately, very interesting, quite a few of the great Christian thinkers of that time, 1600 years ago (John Chrysostom is one), shout: "If you do that, if you institutionalize charity, if you make charity or hospitality into an act of a non-person, a community, Christians will cease to remain famous for what we are now famous for, for having always an extra mattress, a crust of old bread and a candle, for him who might knock at our door." But, for political reasons, the Church became, from the year 400 or 500 on, the main device for roughly a thousand years of proving that the State can be Christian by paying the Church to take care institutionally of small fractions of those who had needs, relieving the ordinary Christian household of the most uncomfortable duty of having a door, having a threshold open for him who might knock and whom I might not choose.

 * I can choose. I have to choose. I have to make my mind up whom I will take into my arms, to whom I will lose myself, whom I will treat as that vis-a-vis, that face into which I look, which I lovingly touch with my fingering gaze, from whom I accept being who I am as a gift.

"The Cultivation of Conspiracy" (1998)

 * Expansion of an address delivered in Bremen, Germany, on receiving the Bremen Culture and Peace Prize (14 March 1998) (Online PDF text)

 * Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. Therefore, I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and the "conditioned" air that hinders the growth of friendship.

 * The impending loss of spirit, of soul, of what I call atmosphere, could go unnoticed. Only persons who face one another in trust can allow its emergence. The bouquet of friendship varies with each breath, but when it is there it needs no name. For a long time I believed that there was no one noun for it, and no verb for its creation. Each time I tried one, I was discouraged; all the synonyms for it were shanghaied by its synthetic counterfeits: mass-produced fashions and cleverly marketed moods, chic feelings, swank highs and trendy tastes. Starting in the seventies, group dynamics retreats and psychic training, all to generate "atmosphere," became major businesses. Discreet silence about the issue I am raising seemed preferable to creating a misunderstanding. Then… I suddenly realized that there is indeed a very simple word that says what I cherished and tried to nourish, and that word is peace. Peace, however, not in any of the many ways its cognates are used all over the world, but peace in its post-classical, European meaning. Peace, in this sense, is the one strong word with which the atmosphere of friendship created among equals has been appropriately named. But to embrace this, one has to come to understand the origin of this peace in the conspirator, a curious ritual behavior almost forgotten today.

 * Speaking about pax in the proto-Christan epoch turned out to be a delicate matter, because around the year 300 pax became a key word in the Christian liturgy. It became the euphemism for a mouth-to-mouth kiss among the faithful attending services; pax became the camouflage for the osculum (from os, mouth), or the conspiratio, a commingling of breaths.

 * The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring. In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu.

 * The other eminent moment of the celebration was, of course, the comestio, the communion in the flesh, the incorporation of the believer in the body of the Incarnate Word, but communio was theologically linked to the preceding con-spiratio. Conspiratio became the strongest, clearest and most unambiguously somatic expression for the entirely non-hierarchical creation of a fraternal spirit in preparation for the unifying meal. Through the act of eating, the fellow conspirators were transformed into a "we," a gathering which in Greek means ecclesia. Further, they believed that the "we" is also somebody's "I"; they were nourished by shading into the "I" of the Incarnate Word. The words and actions of the liturgy are not just mundane words and actions, but events occurring after the Word, that is, after the Incarnation. Peace as the commingling of soil and waters sounds cute to my ears; but peace as the result of conspiratio exacts a demanding, today almost unimaginable intimacy. The practice of the osculum did not go unchallenged; documents reveal that the conspiratio created scandal early on. The rigorist African Church Father, Tertullian, felt that a decent matron should not be subjected to possible embarrassment by this rite. The practice continued, but not its name; the ceremony required a euphemism. From the later third century on, the osculum pacis was referred to simply as pax, and the gesture was often watered down to some slight touch to signify the mutual spiritual union of the persons present through the creation of a fraternal atmosphere. Today, the pax before communion, called "the kiss of peace," is still integral to the Roman, Slavonic, Greek and Syrian Mass, although it is often reduced to a perfunctory handshake.

 * Community in our European tradition is not the outcome of an act of authoritative foundation, nor a gift from nature or its gods, nor the result of management, planning and design, but the consequence of a conspiracy, a deliberate, mutual, somatic and gratuitous gift to each other. The prototype of that conspiracy lies in the celebration of the early Christian liturgy in which, no matter their origin, men and women, Greeks and Jews, slaves and citizens, engender a physical reality that transcends them. The shared breath, the con-spiratio are the "peace" understood as the community that arises from it.

 * As a scholar I have been shaped by a monastic traditions and by the interpretation of medieval texts. Early on I took it for granted that the principal condition for an atmosphere that is propitious to independent thought is the hospitality cultivated by the host: a hospitality that excludes condescension as scrupulously as seduction; a hospitality that by its simplicity defeats the fear of plagiarism as much as that of clientage; a hospitality that by its openness dissolves intimidation as studiously as servility; a hospitality that exacts from the guests as much generosity as it imposes on the host. I have been blessed with a large portion of it, with the taste of a relaxed, humorous, sometimes grotesque fit among mostly ordinary but sometimes outlandish companions who are patient with one another.

The Rivers North of the Future (2005)

 * I believe that the Incarnation makes possible a surprising and entirely new flowering of love and knowledge. For Christians the Biblical God can now be loved in the flesh. Before I was limited by the people into which I was born and the family in which I was raised. Now I can choose whom I will love and where I will love. And this deeply threatens the traditional basis of ethics, which was always an ethnos, an historically given “we” which proceeds any pronunciation of the world “I”.

 * The opening of this horizon is also accompanied by a second danger: institutionalisation. There is a temptation of trying to manage and, eventually, to legislate this new love, to create an institution that will guarantee it, insure it, and protect it by criminalising its opposite.

 * The power is claimed first by the Church and later by the many secular institutions stamped from its mould. Wherever I look for the roots of modernity, I find them in the attempts of churches to institutionalise, legitimise and manage Christian vocation.

 * The personal freedom to choose who will be my other has been transformed into the use of power and money to provide a service. This not only deprives the idea of the neighbour of the quality of freedom implied in the story of the Samaritan. It also creates an impersonal view of how a good society ought to work.

 * Christ came to free us from the law, but Christianity allowed the legal mentality to be brought into the very heart of love.

 * Tyranny of old was exercised over people who still knew how to subsist. They could lose their means of subsistence and be enslaved, but they could not be made needy. With the beginning of capitalist production in the spinning and weaving shops of the Florence of the Medicis, a new type of human being was being engendered: needy man, who has to organise a society, the principal function of which is to satisfy human needs. And needs are much more cruel than tyrants.

 * In this new kind of world neither the vitality of nature nor the creative act of God makes things what they are. This birthright is withdrawn, and things come to be what they are because of their genetic code, as we would say today.

 * For the simple Christian there was the requirement of going to Mass every Sunday – otherwise you go to hell – or of going to confession once a year. The elaboration of this legal organisation, and this legal imposition, which defined missing out on services a sin, immediately preceded the epoch in which the state, the new Church-like state, as I called it earlier, began to introduce its own rituals. And the easiest one to follow is education.

 * I don’t want to speak further about education here but only to show how I personally proceeded in trying to discover the origin of this belief, unknown to other societies, that you need an organised institution to make people competent to understand what is good for them and their community, that knowledge does not come from living but from education, the milk of wisdom flowing from the breasts of an institution.

 * The search for truth presupposes the growth of philia. This philia must find an atmosphere in which it can grow, and this atmosphere cannot be taken for granted as an out-growth of civic virtue.

 * One of the hallmarks of modernity is the progressive replacement of the idea of the good by the idea of values. …. Something very fundamental gets lost when I observe myself against values rather than feel myself as a bundle of miseries, in pain, half crippled tired but bearing all this.

 * God’s love is in the flesh, and the relationship between two people, the mystery of the Samaritan, is inevitably a mystery of the flesh. This becomes very difficult to explain, or even to say, in our generation, during which I believe an extraordinary process, and an extraordinary history of disinfleshment of our perceptions, our concepts and our senses has reached a high point.

 * Disembodiment is reaching a second level which I can only call algorithmization or mathematization. People annihilate their own sensual nature by projecting themselves into abstracta, into abstract notions. And this renunciation of intimate uniqueness through the introjection and self-ascription of statistical entities is being cultivated with extraordinary intensity by the way in which we live. This has to be explored. The consequence is an insensibility not only to myself but to you.

 * The credibility of the world that based itself on citizenship, on responsibility, on power, on equality, on need, claim, and entitlement – the credibility of these as ideals to which it is worthwhile to consecrate your life is declining, and, in my opinion, very fast. I want to suggest the possibility of seeing this as the end of an epoch, just like the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine, and as an entirely new access/credibility/ease of moving into the world of conspiratio, knowing that it can’t be contractually insured, that it’s a renunciation of insurance.

Quotes about Illich

It’s too bad that he didn’t live to see the rise of the Internet, which in some ways has mitigated some of his fears (and in other ways, fulfilled his fears). In any case, his take on the commons and the threats to it are still worth considering.
 * Illich’s essay, "Silence is a Commons", appeared in CoEvolution Quarterly in winter 1983, and I still marvel at how much wisdom he packed into that short piece. It was still the early days of the personal computer revolution, and Illich feared that “computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets.”
 * David Bollier, in "Ivan Illich and Silence as a Commons", in On the Commons (6 September 2006)

 * Illich was valued during his comparatively short period of fame for the destructive possibilities of his criticisms of almost all the institutions of industrial society, capitalist or communist, in books such as Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975) … My attitude to Illich was composed half of admiration, half of irritation. He had a distinctly prophetic quality, but he could also be very silly, and some of the things he said were destructive of civilization itself... He was a flawed figure as a man and as a thinker: but so, no doubt, are we all. And unlike the other radicals of the era such as Herbert Marcuse, he still repays reading. Being not easily pigeon-holed, he forces us to think.
 * Anthony Daniels in "Ivan Illich, 1926-2002" in The New Criterion (January 2003)

 * One of the world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades. … His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue.
 * Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla, in his obituary in The Guardian (8 December 2002)

 * Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania. His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible.
 * Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla, in The Guardian (8 December 2002)

 * Traditional education began to be reexamined. The schools had taught whole generations the values of patriotism, of obeying authority, and had perpetuated ignorance, even contempt for people of other nations, races, Native Americans, women. Not just the content of education was challenged, but the style-the formality, the bureaucracy, the insistence on subordination to authority. This made only a small dent in the formidable national system of orthodox education, but it was reflected in a new generation of teachers all over the country, and a new literature to sustain them: Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age, George Denison, The Lives of Children; Ivan Illich, De-schooling Society.
 * Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

title: Ivan Illich


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Talk:Barry Goldwater

Just moving some quotes from the Wikipedia Goldwater page. I didn't verify their accuracy. I also put some quotes into their proper alphabetical order. The one about Falwell looks suspect to me.--68.6.35.158 03:08, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

here's a url from The Arizona Republic that can offer a bit of sourcing for the Goldwater quotes. I have not the time, nor the inclination for it.

 * Goldwater had a way with words, The Arizona Republic, May. 29, 1998

The quote that is attributed to a speech in the Senate on Sept. 21 1981 is common on the internet and is usually attributed, if at all, to the COngressional Record. However, my extensive search of the CR does not turn up the quote (he made speeches with similiar ideas, hwoever, on the 11th and 24th of that month). At least one other person (see the link to the footnote on his fears about religious extrmeism in the Goldwater article) also searched in the CR and failed to find it. Richard Dawkins quotes it in The God Delusion with just an attribution ot the CR for the date, no page number, and I have a querry in to him to see if can provide further information.

Clarification
"It's political Daddyism and it's as old as demagogues and despotism." There is no clarification as to what "it's" referring to? I don't know how the tags work on here, so i couldn't tag it.

But can someone check this out? Lihaas 13:23, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

 * I am new here, and joined specifically to answer this question. I hope my answer is still relevant.

 * Goldwater said it during the campaign about LBJ. It is sourced in Time Magazine's November 1963 article entitled "Nation: The Underdog Underdog."

The FULL quote is:

"It is a fact that Lyndon Johnson and his curious crew seem to believe that progress in this country is best served simply and directly through the ever-expanding gift power of the everlastingly growing Federal Government. One thing we all know, and I assure you I do: that's a much easier way to get votes than my way. It always has been. It's political Daddyism, and it's as old as demagogues and despotism."

I sure hope that helps! -- Mergatroid.

 * Thanks for the note. The full quote, with sourcing, has now been added to the article. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 19:10, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Barry Goldwater. --Antiquary 18:28, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
 * More frequently attributed to Robert Frost

 * After one of his long-winded harangues I suggested he had probably been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. He responded by saying that I would have been a great success in the movies working for Eighteenth Century-Fox.
 * Speaking of Hubert Humphrey

 * American business has just forgotten the importance of selling.

 * And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse — the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.

 * For the past twenty-five years the apostles of the welfare state, some Republicans, some Democrat, have been busy transforming that stern old gentleman with the top hat, the cutaway coat, the red, white, and blue trousers, from a symbol of dignity and freedom and justice for all men, into a national wet nurse, dispensing a cockeyed kind of patent medcine labeled "something for nothing," passing out the soothing syrup and rattles and pacifiers for grateful votes on election day.

 * Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.

 * I became convinced the isolationist mood of the country after World War I, not the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, had made World War II inevitable. If we had maintained our military superiority throughout the twenties and thirties, President Roosevelt could have warned Hitler not to invade any neutral countries, and that warning would have been heeded.

 * I don't think there was any Reagan revolution. This country is based, its economy is based, on free enterprise. The government's based on a constitutional democracy. And all Reagan did was to continue what Harry Truman did and George Washington started.

 * I will offer a choice, not an echo.

 * I won't say that the papers misquote me, but I sometimes wonder where Christianity would be today if some of those reporters had been Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

 * I wouldn't trust Nixon from here to that phone.

 * If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

 * It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

 * Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people and the world.

 * Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.

 * Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.

 * Sex and politics are a lot alike. You don't have to be good at them to enjoy them.

 * The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.

 * The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they're gay, you don't have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that's what brings me into it.

 * The world will not greet you with open arms, but with a clenched fist.
 * Speaking as a Phoenix, Arizona city councilman to the 1950 graduating class at the segregated Carver High School

 * Throughout history civilian populations and political rulers have talked of peace. We have never been free of war. The soldier, whose profession is war, understands that peace must be enforced by superior military might. The certainty of defeat is the only effective deterrent we can use to maintain peace. Furthermore, we can be strong without being aggressive.

 * To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable.

 * To insist on strength is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering.

 * When I'm not a politician, I'll be dead.

 * You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.

 * Winning isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends or lasting principle, are more important.

=Money Masters= The quote from "Money Masters" seems dubious. There have been claims that some of the quotes in the video version are fakes. Does anyone have more information on this?Chip.berlet (talk) 02:38, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

That quote is not dubious, that is real. You can find that quote in his book "With No Apologies".

http://books.google.hu/books?hl=hu&id=rz53AAAAMAAJ&q=operates+outside#search_anchor

=Is John Dean's book a reliable source?=

This quote comes solely from John Dean's 2006 book. It is supposedly based on Mr. Dean's recollection of a 1994 telephone conversation with Mr. Goldwater:

 * Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them. Said in November 1994, as quoted in John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006)

Mr. Goldwater wrote quite a few books and articles, but it does not appear that he ever wrote anything like this quote. So the only evidence we have for it is Mr. Dean's claim to have recalled the conversation.

A recollection of a supposed private phone conversation, recounted by a convicted felon & disbarred lawyer for the first time twelve years later, and eight years after Mr. Goldwater's death, seems very far from being a reliable source. In the absence of corroboration, I think this supposed quote is unreliable and should be deleted. NCdave (talk) 00:20, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Barry Goldwater


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User talk:Xhoodyman216x

~ Kalki 04:21, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Xhoodyman216x


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Talk:William Hartnell

Quotations/notes not formatted correctly, no citations for facts. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:33, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

How about some Hartnell interview quotes

title: Talk:William Hartnell


text:
Talk:Gallagher

Old header style, quotation marks, lynx template in middle, no distinction between sourced and attributed. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:40, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to. ~ Ningauble 15:51, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

 * "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! I did not come here tonight to make you laugh! I came here to sell you something!  And I want ya to pay particular attention, because The Amazing Master Tool Corporation, a subsidiary of Fly By Night Industries, has entrusted who? -- me! -- to show you! -- the handiest and the dandiest kitchen tool you've ever seen, and don't ya wanna know how it works!  First you take an ordinary apple!  You place the ordinary apple in between the patented pans!  Then you reach for the tool that is not a slicer, not a dicer, not a chopper in a hopper!  What in the hell can it possibly be?   SLEDGE-O-MATIC!"
 * -- Intro to the Sledge-O-Matic sequence, which has remained basically unchanged during Gallagher's 25 years as a comedian.

 * "Sledge-O-Matic removes unwanted fingerprints from walls. Sledge-O-Matic also removes unwanted walls from fingerprints."
 * "Sledge-O-Matic will teach the dumbest dog to play dead, it puts the cat out all night, and it keeps the neighbors' kids in their own damn yards."
 * "Living in California is like living in a bowl of granola; what ain't fruits or nuts, is flakes."
 * " 'I before E except after C?' Americans don't want to learn that!  They just sort of make an 'I' lookin 'E' and an 'E' lookin 'I' then put the dot, right there in the middle!"
 * "Hey, what do you expect from a culture that drives on parkways and parks on driveways?"
 * "I wish there was a knob on the TV so you could turn up the intelligence. They got one called 'brightness', but it don't work, does it?"
 * "People like crowds. The bigger the crowd, the more people show up. Small crowd, hardly anybody shows up."
 * "Remember this advice... Never let your mom comb your hair when she's mad at your dad!" (removes hat to display bald head)
 * (About cats being picky eaters) "This is no gourmet; look where he licks. What gourmet licks his own butt?  That's what makes you mad!  They won't eat the food you've got for 'em, but then he goes over there and licks his butt.  They ought to make butt-flavored cat food."
 * "If your knees bent the other way, what would a chair look like?"
 * "Wouldn't it be great if people were the same in bed as they are in every day life? When Mark Spitz gets done, does he do a flip off the headboard and come back for another lap? 'Gee, Nadia, that was PERFECT! That full twisting dismount wasn't bad either, babe!'"
 * "Y'know, God experimented with the other animals before he got around to us. You ladies oughtta thank him for creating the cow, and getting that udder idea out of his head!"
 * "You ever see that sign: 'This Door Must Remain Shut At All Times'... why have a goddamn door?"
 * "You know what's stupid? Skiing.  You get on top of a slippery mountain with sleds on your feet and you go down... big deal.  Try not to.  Or, go up!  Now that'd be a sport for ya!"
 * "If M & M's 'melt in your mouth, not in your hand.' what would they do, say... under your arms?"
 * "What makes Teflon stick to the pan?"
 * "Why do they call 'em 'buildings' when they're done building 'em?  They ought to be called 'builts.'  Or, 'crumblings.'  'I live in that crumbling over there.'"
 * "We go to school to learn to communicate, but all the teachers say to us is "shut up!"
 * "Wonder why it is your underarms stink. Did it ever come in handy? Did you ever say 'Well thank God my underarms stunk! He came out of the bushes and I said Get back! I've been to aerobics!'"
 * "Women wear a pair of panties but only one bra."
 * "My daughter's gettin' so big lately, I usually don't have to duck when I get in the van. Well my heart was in the right place. I said, "Amy, wanna go for a ride in the van"...CLUNK!!! She doesn't cry. She just looks me right in the eye as if to say, "Are you that fucking stupid?" "Yes." Then she cries...cause she knows we're related."
 * "If it ain't sex, what is it gang? Beer beer beer beer beer beer beer! You ain't an American unless you're drinking a beer! All the time, dammit, any damn time is a time for Bud! Bullshit! Traffic Court. 'Hang on there judge, let me pop a cool one here. Weaving!? I can't even knit!'"
 * "I would like now to talk about the Japanese, a race of very short people who are always bending in half. You can't make an honest business deal with them because you can't look em' in the eye. I don't believe any group of people should be able to build a car they can't pronounce. I'm talking of course about the 'Cororra'."
 * "Wonder why it is God didn't give us wheels. He must've known we get skates for Christmas."
 * "Before the invention of the telephone, you had to lie to people to their face!"
 * "Why are all the home-ec teachers divorced?"
 * "Why do they call them cowboys? Cows is girls; bulls is boys. They should call them 'cowgirls' and 'bullboys.'"
 * "When yogurt goes bad, how can you tell?"
 * "When I would skip school, what would they do to punish me? They'd kick me out!  'He won't come, we won't let him!  Fix his ass.'"
 * "I like church though. Church was a reminder there was somethin' worse than school."
 * "This I before E stuff would've screwed up Einstein. He's got it wrong twice in his name."
 * "I am going to proud when the aliens run across that three-pronged plastic thing they use to keep the pizza off the cardboard. That's igenuity!"

title: Talk:Gallagher


text:
User talk:68.209.131.221

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:07, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:68.209.131.221


text:
Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American political theorist whose work deals with the nature of power, authority, and totalitarianism.

Quotes

 * Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
 * The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16

 * It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.
 * The Human Condition (1958)

 * It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to ‘conquer space’ and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for ‘true reality’ that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena as they reveal themselves of their own accord to human sense and reason. They were inspired by an extraordinary love of harmony and lawfulness which taught them that they would have to step outside any merely given sequence or series of occurrences if they wanted to discover the overall beauty and order of the whole, that is, the universe.
 * On the subject scientific discovery. Source: Between Past and Future, published in 1961. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free

 * Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962)

 * 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), ch. 2.
 * On the subject the evil of hypocrisy. Source: On Revolution, published in 1963. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
 * Men in Dark Times (1968)

 * In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
 * On the subject violence and power. Source: On Violence, published in 1970. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
 * The New Yorker (12 September 1970)

 * The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
 * On the subject progress. Source: Interview with French writer Roger Errera, 1974. New York Review of Books. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * 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; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days  — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
 * On the subject freedom of press. Source: Interview with French writer Roger Errera, 1974. New York Review of Books. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * 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 (1978), "Thinking"

 * I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.
 * Speaking of her book The Human Condition, as quoted in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, p. xxiv

 * The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.
 * "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294

 * The phenomenon of the will [in Epictetus ] [...] a different mental ability whose chief characteristic is that it speaks an imperative even when it commands nothing but our ability to think. The goal is to annihilate reality insofar it concerns me.
 * Hannah Arendt Lecture on Thinking

Love and Saint Augustine (1929)

 * As edited by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: 1996)

 * In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.
 * p. 17

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

 * 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.
 * On the subject “alternate facts”. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. [...] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

 * The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
 * Preface to the first edition, written in the summer of 1950

 * Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.
 * Part 1, Ch. 1, § 1

 * A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
 * Part 3, Ch. 2 The Totalitarian Movement, page 80
 * On the subject lies and mass propaganda. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * The Nazis were ‘convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,’ Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proven time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.
 * Part 3, Ch. 1 § 1

 * The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.
 * Part 3, Ch. 1 § 1

 * Hitler never intended to defend ‘the West’ against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.
 * Part 3, Ch. 1 § 1

 * The only man for whom Hitler had ‘unqualified respect’ was ‘Stalin the genius’, and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not… have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev’s speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.
 * Part 3, Ch. 1 § 1

 * What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.
 * Part 3, Ch. 10, § 2

 * Real power begins where secrecy begins.
 * Part 3, Ch. 12, § 1

 * The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
 * Part 3, Ch. 12, § 3

 * 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.
 * Part 3, Ch. 13, § 3

 * On the subject the ideal subjects for a totalitarian authority. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019

Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

 * Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

 * 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.
 * On the subject bureaucracy as a means of totalitarianism. Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * 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.
 * On the subject the banal normality of villains. Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original on October 1, 2019.

 * [H]e was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.[…] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him.[…] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
 * Ch. III

 * What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!
 * Ch. VI

 * The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven."
 * Ch. VIII

 * Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality. And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people.  Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.
 * Ch. VIII

 * For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
 * Ch. XIV

 * 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, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.
 * Epilogue

 * No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
 * Epilogue

"Some Questions of Moral Philosophy"

 * It is not murder which is forgiven but the killer, his person as it appears in circumstances and intentions. The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders.
 * To put it another way: the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons. Within the conceptual framework of these considerations we could say that wrongdoers who refuse to think by themselves what they are doing and who also refuse in retrospect to think about it, that is, go back and remember what they did (which is teshuvah or repentance), have actually failed to constitute themselves into somebodies. By stubbornly remaining nobodies they prove themselves unfit for intercourse with others who, good, bad, or indifferent, are at the very least persons.
 * Lecture read in 1965 and 1966, in Responsibility and Judgment, 2003, ISBN 0-8052-4212-0, pages 111-112

Crises of the Republic (1969)

 * The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
 * "On Violence"

 * The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
 * "On Violence"

 * 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.
 * "On Violence"

 * 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.
 * "Civil Disobedience"

 * Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization — the man-made artifact to house successive generations — would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
 * "Civil Disobedience"

 * 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.
 * "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary"

 * For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.
 * "Lying in Politics"

The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
New York, Harcourt, 1978

 * Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
 * p. 4

 * Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
 * p. 5

 * It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.
 * p. 7

 * Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
 * p. 12

 * If [...] the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.
 * p. 13

 * Kant ... discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
 * p. 14

 * Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.
 * p. 14

 * Kant stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge. . . to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.
 * p. 14

 * The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
 * p. 15

 * The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
 * pp. 31-32

 * If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic “inside we are all alike,” just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. […] The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.
 * pp. 34-35

 * […]the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.
 * p. 39

 * It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understand these [metaphysical] fallacies as logical non sequiturs—as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as “meaningless” are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, In our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.
 * p. 45

 * If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.
 * p. 55

 * Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
 * p. 56

 * To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
 * p. 61

 * Kant [...] stated that he had “found it necessary to deny knowledge […] to make room for faith,” but all he had “denied” was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
 * p. 63

 * Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason’s inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only “understand” what is past what neither remove it nor “rejuvenate it” … have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind’s impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume’s famous dictum that “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason’s uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world’s appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man’s faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness — the old hen pan, “the all is one” — either a single source or a single ruler.
 * p. 70

The New York Review of Books interview with the French writer Roger Errera (1978)

 * Source: Hannah Arendt: From an Interview. Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview. Copyright © 1978 Mary McCarthy West, Trustee. Archived via Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive on February 22, 2017.

 * Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change — no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung — the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.

 * 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; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days  — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

 * The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.

 * Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages — had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?

Quotes about Arendt

 * as Arendt notes, only elected representatives had their participation institutionalized in the Constitution: "The Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representatives of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of 'expressing, discussing, and deciding' which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom."
 * Cristina Beltrán p 43 Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (2020)

 * In turning to Arendt to consider noncitizen mass protest, we are immediately confronted with several shortcomings in her own political thinking. As many have noted, Arendt's conceptions of labor, the body, the private realm, and "the social question" mark her as a rather vexed figure in democratic theory. In her desire to privilege freedom and action, she often problematically denies political status to questions of necessity and economics (what Mark Reinhardt refers to in The Art of Being Free as "the problem of human needs").
 * Cristina Beltrán The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (2010)

 * In Paris, during the war, Jewish partisans organized commando actions at Jewish workshops in the Faubourg Poissonière, where the bosses prospered from making equipment for the Wehrmacht; some of these combatants were arrested in the course of the actions, denounced by these 'good' Jews, and shot or deported. In the ghettos, the shadow fighters liquidated the most zealous members of the Jewish police or the collaborators of certain Judenräte. The leader of the Resistance in Vilnius handed himself in to the Germans under the pressure of his brothers in misfortune. The Judaism of the devout, fuelled basically by incantations and conditioned reflexes, does not like facts of this kind to be remembered. Which is why Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem has a sulphurous odour still today.
 * Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (2016)

 * I wonder whether Habermasian constitutionalism, with its emphasis upon the burden of history, is exactly comparable to the ethics of republicanism as articulated by Arendt, for example. The latter seems to me something rather different from “republicanism” as conventionally understood in English or American thought. It is founded, I think, not upon an account of history, nor even a theory of natural arrangements or the artifices of human nature (as in Enlightenment exchanges), but approximates rather more closely to what the late Judith Shklar called “the liberalism of fear.” Arendt’s is, to coin a phrase, the republicanism of fear. In this way of thinking, the foundation for a modern, democratic politics must be our historical awareness of the consequences of not forging and preserving a modern, democratic polity. What matters, to put it bluntly, is that we understand as well as possible the risks of getting it wrong, rather than devoting ourselves over-enthusiastically to the business of getting it right.
 * Tony Judt, in Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the twentieth century (2012), Ch. 1. "The Name Remains: Jewish Questioner"

 * I found disturbing echoes of Trump's rhetorical style in Hannah Arendt's description of Stalinist and Nazi apparatchiks in The Origins of Totalitarianism
 * Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point (2021)

 * When I read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, I almost wrote something about it. The book is so exciting that I got sick from it for a couple of weeks; not that there would be any toxic attack [Giftspritzer] against me in it (the assistant of the defense lawyer Servatius, a certain Dr Dieter Wechtenbruch, who I do not know by the way and of whom I had never heard up to now is characterized as a “disciple of Carl Schmitt” on p. 129) but rather because it made me think back to my legal brief [Gutachten] from August 1945, in particular its final section [Schlussbemerkung]. But I prefer to keep my silence.
 * Carl Schmitt, in letter to Ernst Forsthoff on 18 November 1963, published in Dorothee Mußgnug, Reinhard Mußgnug, and Angela Reinthal, eds., Ernst Forsthoff und Carl Schmitt: Briefwechsel 1926–1974 (Berlin, 2007), and quoted in Niklas Plaetzer, "Eichmann in Plettenberg: Carl Schmitt reads Hannah Arendt", Modern Intellectual History (2022)

Misattributed

 * Fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created. And if you get people to do that, you can convince them to do anything.
 * Jason Stanley Vox interview is paraphrasing Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism quote on "mass propaganda... tactical cleverness."

title: Hannah Arendt


text:
Talk:James Randi

Telekinesis quote
The telekinesis quote is often attributed to Vonnegut. I suspect this is false- I'm fairly familiar with Vonnegut's works and I don't remember him writing that. I'm also a little unsure that Randi said this either. 208.191.170.94 07:03, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

 * Randi said it at the end of this issue of Swift. He might not have been the first to say it, though.   Bubba73 01:17, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

 * Thank you, 208.191.170.94, for that valuable lesson on why sourcing is so important. A few weeks after your posting, I finally got around to adding the citation that Bubba73 mentions to the quote. This way, no one need take our word for Randi having said it — it's available for verification. It's definitely one of those witticisms that is so appropriate that it makes you think someone must have said it before. I welcome folks to do research to discover an ealier source, but ask them to please cite references if they find something. (The web and even print media are littered with unsourced attributions of quotes.) Updating and correcting quotation information based on sourced data strengthens Wikiquote. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:00, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to James Randi. --Antiquary 18:33, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
 * "Concerning the challenge, I always have an 'out': I'm right!" (According to a personal communication with Randi, this is what he actually said, which was misquoted in Fate.)

On homeopathy

 * "I do not expect that homeopathy will ever be established as a legitimate form of treatment, but I do expect that it will continue to be popular."
 * "Feeling better is not actually being better."
 * "Heroin also makes people feel better, but I wouldn't recommend using heroin."

title: Talk:James Randi


text:
User talk:213.202.154.248

UDScott 15:49, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:213.202.154.248