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Quotes by Hannah Arendt

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
– Hannah Arendt
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
– Hannah Arendt
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
– Hannah Arendt
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
– 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.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
– Hannah Arendt
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
– 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.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
– Hannah Arendt
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -but no opinion.
– Hannah Arendt
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
– Hannah Arendt
The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
– Hannah Arendt
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
– Hannah Arendt
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the ''easy life of the gods'' would be a lifeless life.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
– 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; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
– Hannah Arendt
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
– Hannah Arendt
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
– Hannah Arendt
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
– Hannah Arendt
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.
– Hannah Arendt
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
– Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
– Hannah Arendt
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.
– Hannah Arendt
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
– Hannah Arendt
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
– Hannah Arendt
Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
– Hannah Arendt
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
– Hannah Arendt
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
– 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.
– 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.
– Hannah Arendt