Hannah Arendt Quotes

Those who hold positions and receive official stipends are incapable of the utmost in loyalty and patriotic service.

I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal neglect of this government …. Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence.

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.

Civil servants who tell the truth are fired and those who are incompetent are retained.

You are for kings the ears with which they hear, the eyes with which they see, the tongues with which they speak, the hands with which they strike.

The main thing is the ‘rule of corruption’: helping the horse both to race and also to get a mouthful of hay. It’s what all civil servants are secretly thinking. Our expectations for our civil servants are far too high, far too grandiose. The pressure is more than their flesh-and-blood bodies can stand.

There are, perhaps, few men who can for any great length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their public duties. Their integrity may be proof against improper considerations immediately addressed to themselves, but they are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt. Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.

A bureaucrat is an official who is clothed with power and whom it doesn't fit.

We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God's commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. . . . This leads to frightful results. . . . The British State considers it the duty of an Englishman to kill people who are not English whenever a collection of elderly gentlemen in Westminster tells him to do so. . . . Church and State are placable enemies of both intelligence and virtue.

I'm a statistic in a system that a civil servant dominates.

The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.

Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over.

We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.

There was a sergeant at a desk. I knew he was a sergeant because I recognized the marks on his uniform, and I knew it was a desk because it's always a desk. There's always someone at a desk, except when it's a table that functions as a desk. You sit behind a desk, and everyone knows you're supposed to be there, and that you're doing something that involves your brain. It's an odd, special kind of importance. I think everyone should get a desk; you can sit behind it when you feel like you don't matter.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.

You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.

The founding fathers never once rationalized getting in power and having control so they could stay in power.

We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes - and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.

Only by himself, with one acre and a house, will a dunce be a dunce. Once he manages to gain power, he'll turn into a scoundrel.

The government doesn't want us to have weapons and yet, they have weapons. I think the biggest weapon they have is the IRS - Internal Revenue Service. They can use taxes as a weapon, and the IRS code that you can't even figure it out.

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue. To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, indorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.

Beware the abuse of Power. Both by those we disagree with, as well as those we may agree with

I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.

Question authority; but, raise your hand first.