Hannah Arendt Quotes

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology... view

By: Hannah Arendt

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... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

There are no dangerous thoughts.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties... view

By: Hannah Arendt

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think... view

By: Hannah Arendt

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford... view

By: Hannah Arendt

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Where all are guilty, no one is.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses... view

By: Hannah Arendt

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country... view

By: Hannah Arendt

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... view

By: Hannah Arendt

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny... view

By: Hannah Arendt

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past... view

By: Hannah Arendt

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless... view

By: Hannah Arendt

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Power and violence are opposites.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up... view

By: Hannah Arendt

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility.. view

By: Hannah Arendt

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... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition... view

By: Hannah Arendt

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution... view

By: Hannah Arendt