Alan M. de León’s Reviews > We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience > Status Update

“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.”