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“It is not big ideas about humanity that will defeat totalitarianism, Arendt concluded in her lecture. A genuinely plural politics requires the kinds of friends who not only grant one another their own truths, but who know exactly what they are up against politically and historically when they do so.”

“What really makes life in the library meaningful is what goes on between the people, and between their books, themselves. Nobody knows the meaning of the storybook of mankind, but without it life would be unbearable. The human world is built on little more than the necessities and hazards of living, speaking, and being human together. The little more, of course, is everything that is.”

“Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human condition.”

“We have free will, but… only… within a sea of contingency. There is always a price to be paid for freedom. Contingency, plurality, the sheer passiveness of human existence, the best and the worst. Freedom cannot be forced; it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it.”

“It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst.”

“Facts, after all, do not stand by themselves but need testimony, narrative, and witnesses; the kind of storytelling that can make facts appeal to people who do indeed have different opinions. The political storytellers we need the most right now, perhaps, are those who are most skilled at persuading us to share a world of facts.”

“Political lying practically isn’t even lying anymore. People are not duped. They are positively keen for deceit… To believe in the incredible and outrageous has become a kind of pseudo-action - a last lunatic lunge for political belonging.”

“The modern political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody.”

“Read the Pentagon Papers carefully, she said, and they reveal that there was little real purpose in the [Vietnam] war other than the need for a super power to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed the ‘mightiest power on earth.’

This was America’s big lie and it was as pernicious as any concocted in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”

“Violence is always a sign of the failure of politics.”

“There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous.”

“Man knows all, but at what cost?”

“There is a reason why James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, and Rachel Carson are three of the writers from the last century whose voices speak to us most urgently in our own. They show us, yet again, possibly because people did not pay sufficient attention time first time, possibly because the very things they feared have indeed got much worse, the beauty and fragility of existence.”

“Carson, Baldwin, and Arendt laid out the threats to the human condition on earth: endemic and violent racism, reckless greed, overconsumption, unthinking technological change, and environmental catastrophe - the poisonous masterplots of modern life.”

“To be in one’s love = to be forced into one’s innermost existence… I love you - I want you to be what you are.“

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

“Coaxed out of the shadows by the promise of autonomy and self determination, all that modern social life had delivered to the marginalized, so she thought, was the freedom to try and be yourself in a world that dictated the terms upon which that freedom was acceptable. Women and slaves have learned the hard way to be suspicious when they are finally invited to the party.”

“‘Nothing,’ wrote Arendt, ‘ perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than a vague, pervasive hatred of everyone and everything.”

“Hyper-understanding is a means of survival.

This puts a big strain. Yes, it puts a big strain on the individual… Nevertheless, isn’t this what civilization is about? Isn’t this what tragedy has always taught us?

When we act, we make ourselves real in the world. Aristotle believed that courage the most important political virtue.”

“The one thing - perhaps the most important thing - Hannah Arendt’s life and writing teaches us, is to take nothing for granted. Don’t assume. Don’t accept. Test your thoughts against reality. Question. Do the work. Think.”

“Few white observers at least troubled themselves to ask the one question, according to Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, that must be asked of every newcomer - and every changemaker - in a truly plural world: Who are you? What do your actions and speech - your agency - tell us, who share the world with you, about you?”

“Jacques Derrida described how the passion to preserve the past is also a symptom of the drive to destroy what has made us.

Hannah Arendt was archiving history - the history of totalitarianism - in order to destroy the habits of the mind, the structures of feeling, and the histories of oppression that made it possible.”

“Arendt simply didn’t believe that charity should be a political principle. Far better to fix things so that people did not end up in death and detention camps, exiled and vulnerable in the first place. Charity, as is also the case with violence, is a failure of politics.”