Hannah Arendt

The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

I consider dangerous nonsense—as, for example, politicizing and “refunctioning” (what the Germans call umfunktionieren) the universities, that is, perverting their function, and other things of that sort.

this is the so-called internal emigration among the murderers—which means the extinction of the whole concept of inner emigration or inner resistance.

Remorse is for little children

In my view, the Germans as a people aren’t especially brutal. In fact, I do not believe in such national characteristics … Still, the story I told just now, Jünger’s story, is specifically German. I mean this inability, as Kant says, if I can now really quote his own words, “to think in the place of every other person”—yes, the inability … This kind of stupidity, it’s like talking to a brick wall.

Each person is a lawgiver.