100+ Hannah Arendt Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.170, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Anger, Mean, Earthquakes, Misery And Suffering, Incurable Disease

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

Topics: Nurse, Support, Nursery

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Topics: Twenties, Facts, Advantage

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Topics: Political, Events, Revolution

That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.

Topics: Beautiful, Party, Two, Sophistry, Dialectics

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.

Topics: Running, Risk, Today

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

Topics: Love, Peace, Powerful, Rarity, Anti Political

Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

Topics: Equality, Organization, Born

Factual truth is always related to other people [...]. It is political by nature.

Topics: People, Political, Truth Is

While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.

Topics: Spring, Men, Quality

Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.

Topics: Past, Lost, Significance

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

Topics: Men, Justice, Moral, Reticence

It is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent

Topics: Depressing, Guilt, Repent

The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.

Topics: Strong, Order, Envy, Hobbes, Modern Age

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.

Topics: Peace, Mean, Coercion, Totalitarianism, Dominating

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Topics: Peace, Winning, Men, Vanguard, Populist

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

Topics: Fear, Survival, Emotion

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.

Topics: Secret, Victory, World, Random Events

Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

Topics: World, Stakes

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wanderhelplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities--a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.

Topics: Lonely, Integrity, Heart, Lonely Heart

... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

Topics: Truth, Moving, Men, Relevance, Meaningfulness

The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into theheritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony--unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.

Topics: Political, Revolution, Forgotten, Patrimony

It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.

Topics: Meaningful, Freedom, Labor, Ferrets, Automation

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ...

Topics: Stories, Actors, Life Story

... the space left to freedom is very small.ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.

Topics: Freedom, Human Nature, Determinism

... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

Topics: Past, Men, Remember

... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.

Topics: Religious, Loss, Religion, His Loss

The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.

Topics: Life, Blessing

... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their bundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living;" such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is to the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society.

Topics: Art, Work, People, Common Denominator, Lowest Common Denominator

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

Topics: Thoughtful, Thinking, Action

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Topics: Children, Responsibility, Hands, Love Our Children

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibilityâ”€â”€of being unable to undo what one has doneâ”€â”€is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.

Topics: Men, Promise, Forgiving, Unpredictability

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

Topics: Doe

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Topics: Responsibility, Keys, Effort, Modern Times

Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.

Topics: Men, Frustration, Temptation, Exasperation

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.

Topics: Action, Destruction, Violent, Non Violent

Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.

Topics: Death, Strong, Thoughtful, Wills And Testaments

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.

Topics: Past, Able, Oblivion, Great Author

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

Topics: People, Fiction, True And False, Fact And Fiction

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.

source: - "Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism", www.openculture.com. January 24, 2017.

Topics: Truth, Real, Lying, Substitution

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

Topics: Evil, Apathy, Thrive

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.154, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Laughter, Enemy, Way

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2009). “Responsibility and Judgment”, p.36, Schocken

Topics: Evil, Weakness, Argument

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Topics: Evil, Strange, Interdependence, Thoughtlessness

We are free to change the world and start something new in it.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: World, Changing The World, Something New

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

Topics: Peace, War, People

This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.

Topics: Beautiful, Men, Thinking, Rare Moments, Ordinary Man

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is 'in power' we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with ... disappears, 'his power' also vanishes.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Power, Names, Numbers

Violence is an expression of impotence.

Topics: Expression, Violence, Impotence

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

Topics: Thinking, Doe, Truth Is

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.241, Penguin

Topics: Together, Atrocities, Viewpoints

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.70, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Peace, War, Errors, Unending, Infallibility

the public sphere is as consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1973). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.345, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Equality, Rights, Law, Differentiation

the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Topics: Government, Tyrants, Political

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

Topics: Lying, Political, Tools, Dealings

Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.

Topics: Violence, Arise, Impotence, Powerlessness

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “Men in Dark Times”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Political, Serious, Politician

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Reality, Expression, Adherence, Banality

One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.

Topics: Thinking, Soul, Body

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

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Momentum, Language, Propaganda, Totalitarianism

It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possess neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Roots, Evil, Frustrated, Fungi, Defying

In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of succcessful businessmen.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Business, Taken, Politics, Statesmen

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

source: - "The Jewish Writings".

Topics: Fighting, Blessing, Past, Better Future

Thought and action must never part company.

Topics: Action, Thoughts And Actions, Company

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

Topics: Children, Yesterday, Police, Police State, Climax

I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.

Topics: Giving Up, Feminism, Desire

When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.

Topics: Thinking, Support, Typical

Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.

Topics: Loneliness, Two, Solitude

Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Men, People, Humanity, Born Free, Crimes Against Humanity

There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Lying, Order, Lines, Counterproductive, Truth And Falsehood

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.204, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Evil, Suffering, Together, Sufferers

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.150, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Power, People, Political, Political Institutions

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.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Discovery, Guilt, Doing Nothing, Culprit

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

source: - The Human Condition ch. 6 (1958)

Topics: Bureaucracy

To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.177, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Mean, Initiative

The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2012). “Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Reality, Differences, Victory

Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and ... such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “Men in Dark Times”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Hero, Men, Light

where everybody is guilty, nobody is.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.440, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Responsibility, Guilt, Guilty

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1973). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Men, Essence, Humanity, Impasse

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.207, Penguin

Topics: People, Terror, Conditions

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.50, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Reality, World

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

Topics: Fate, History, Doomed

Every thought is an afterthought.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Art, Philosophy, History, Afterthought

If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant in this respect almost alone among the philosophers was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.

source: - "The Life of the Mind". Book by Hannah Arendt, p. 13, 1978.

Topics: Stupid, Philosophy, Exercise, Relatable, Erudite

We all carry fault within.

Topics: Faults

Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.49, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Excellence, Definitions, Action

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Class, Expansion, Limits

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.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.120, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Life, Pain, Effort, Easy Life, Lifeless

If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it.

Topics: Wise, Wisdom, Knows

Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false-not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats.

Topics: Wisdom, Different, Alternatives, Capitalism And Socialism

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Nature, Earth, Quintessence

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

Topics: Funny, Beauty, Girl, Good Horse

Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.161, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Lying, Past, Violence

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.

Topics: Men, Organization, Political

Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.176, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Philosophy, Frustration

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On violence”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Topics: Death, War, Simple, Arbiter, Death Wish

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

Topics: Peace, War, Women, Small Nations

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.31, HMH

Topics: Needs, Quests, Inspired

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

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Philosophy, Medicine, Perception

With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.155, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Art, Philosophy, History

It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Individual Strength, Independence, Groups

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.

Topics: Integrity, War, Divorce

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.219, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Reality, World, Ideology, Third World

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: New Beginnings, History, Ends

The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “Men in Dark Times”, p.115, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Being In Love, Destiny, People

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.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.317, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Mean, Men, Desire

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.

Topics: Mistake, Love Is, People

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.

source: - Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn (2006). “Between Past and Future”, p.148, Penguin

Topics: Real, Evil, Sound, Use Of Force

Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1966). “The origins of totalitarianism”

Topics: Political, Isms, Satisfaction, Great Political

What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Men, May, Results

When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.

Topics: Country, Freedom, Blessing, Free Enterprise, Freedom Of Assembly

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Emotion, States, Feels

The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Strength, Independence, Peculiar

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.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.238, Penguin

Topics: Punishment, Criminals, Firsts, Possessed, Deterrence

Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.246, Penguin

Topics: Issues, Goal, May

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.

Topics: Opportunity, Fickle, May, Forming Opinions

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Mean, Past, Goal

You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.

Topics: Thinking, Evil, Judging

Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand--in the same sense that I have understood--that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Home, Men, Giving

Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.

Topics: Destiny, People, Luck

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1973). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Knowledge, Men, Earth, Commonplace

Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1963). “On revolution”, Viking Press

Topics: Hypocrite, Hypocrisy, Ambitious

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Politics, Concepts

It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of ‘destiny,’ you not only change its ‘natural laws’ but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2009). “The Jewish Writings”, p.223, Schocken

Topics: Fate, Destiny, Law

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Topics: Men, Thinking, Civilization

Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself.

Topics: Devil, Helping, Guilty, Not Guilty

Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity.

Topics: Loneliness, Fate, Reality

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

source: - Hannah Arendt (1957). “Rahel Varnhagen: the life of a Jewess”

Topics: Beautiful, Reality, Isolated

What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!

Topics: Subjects, Our Thoughts

The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.

source: - "The Life of the Mind" by Hannah Arendt, New York, Harcourt, (pp. 34-35), 1978.

Topics: Differences, Psychology, Body, Modern Psychology

the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

Topics: Peace, War, Lying

thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.115, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Thinking, Speaking Up, Speak

Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2017). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.553, Penguin UK

Topics: Reality, Thinking, Five Senses, Sixth Sense, Logical Thinking

For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Choices, Being Different, Infinite

Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.77, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Roles, Assuming, Corruption

I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Writing, Want, Type

Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the people to share a public power without providing them at the same time with more public space than the ballot box and with more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than on election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being citizens and of acting as citizens.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1963). “On revolution”, Viking Press

Topics: Wisdom, Opportunity, Space, Foreboding

The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Lying, Battle, Losing

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.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.121, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Freedom, Successful, Men

The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Power, Violence, Form

Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

source: - The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)

Topics: Thinking, Men, Political, Human Capacity

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.133, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Dream, Saws

It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1963). “On revolution”, Viking Press

Topics: Space, Development, Causes, Future Development

The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Years, Way, Convincing

No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.

source: - Hannah Arendt, Ronald Beiner (1989). “Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy”, p.66, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Oysters, Matter, Taste, Disturbing Things

in addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition.

Topics: Character, Men, Self

the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.251, Penguin

Topics: Political, Form, Bureaucracy

the right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right ... Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2009). “Responsibility and Judgment”, p.203, Schocken

Topics: Home, Pursuit Of Happiness, Rights, Life Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness, Declaration Of Independence

Political institutions, no matter how well or badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being. Independent existence marks the work of art as a product of making; utter dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Art, Mean, Independent, Political Institutions

Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity" would be devoid of meaning.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.235, Penguin

Topics: Diversity, Humanity, Would Be, Expulsion, Human Diversity

Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1978). “The Life of the Mind: Thinking”

Topics: Home, Ifs And, Anticipation

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

Topics: Ideas, Events, Distinguished

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2009). “Responsibility and Judgment”, p.166, Schocken

Topics: Morning, Night, Thinking

Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.192, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Nihilism, Sides, Creeds, Positive Values

There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.

Topics: Wise, Thinking, Yield, Singularity

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.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.221, Penguin

Topics: Depressing, Being Sad, Guilt

To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1970). “On violence”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Topics: Witty, Power, Speak, Impotence

every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.

source: - Hannah Arendt (2017). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.198, Penguin UK

Topics: Power, Political, Expansion

It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political talents can assert themselves only in rare cases, and it is even rarer that the specifically political qualifications survive the petty maneuvers of party politics with its demands for plain salesmanship.

Topics: Party, Political, Demand, Salesmanship

Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.

source: - Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.162, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Gun, Perfect, Violence