Top 100 Hannah Arendt Quotes
#1. Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.
Hannah Arendt
#2. Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one's work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the 'venture of the public realm.
Hannah Arendt
#3. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#4. 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
#5. The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt
#6. Power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.
Hannah Arendt
#7. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
Hannah Arendt
#8. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#9. Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art...
Hannah Arendt
#10. For the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of "wise men"; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew.
Hannah Arendt
#12. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
Hannah Arendt
#13. The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.
Hannah Arendt
#14. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
Hannah Arendt
#15. Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.
Hannah Arendt
#16. Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnis vita servitium est.
Hannah Arendt
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.
Hannah Arendt
#20. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.
Hannah Arendt
#21. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#22. Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.
Hannah Arendt
#23. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#24. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#25. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.
Hannah Arendt
#26. It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
Hannah Arendt
#27. Half of politics is "image-making", the other half the art of making people believe the imager
Hannah Arendt
#29. Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
Hannah Arendt
#30. Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time
Hannah Arendt
#31. The fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
Hannah Arendt
#32. Since the peace treaties
of 1919 and 1920, the refugees and
the stateless have attached themselves
like a curse to all the newly
established states on earth which
were created in the image of the
nation-state.
Hannah Arendt
#33. The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
Hannah Arendt
#34. According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame.
Hannah Arendt
#35. 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
#36. ANTISEMITISM, a secular nineteenth-century ideology - which in name, though not in argument, was unknown before the 1870's - and religious Jew-hatred, inspired by the mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds, are obviously not the same;
Hannah Arendt
#37. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#38. A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.
Hannah Arendt
#39. By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Hannah Arendt
#40. The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.
Hannah Arendt
#41. Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power ...
Hannah Arendt
#42. Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
Hannah Arendt
#43. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#44. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
Hannah Arendt
#45. Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.
Hannah Arendt
#46. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.
Hannah Arendt
#47. The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether.
Hannah Arendt
#48. They knew by instinct rather than by insight that this new expansion movement, in which "patriotism . . . is best expressed in money-making" (Huebbe-Schleiden) and the national flag is a "commercial asset" (Rhodes), could only destroy the political body of the nation-state.
Hannah Arendt
#50. Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them 'children'.
Hannah Arendt
#51. When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
Hannah Arendt
#52. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#53. It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
Hannah Arendt
#54. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#55. Unfortunately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed.
Hannah Arendt
#56. The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
Hannah Arendt
#57. Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics ...
Hannah Arendt
#58. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy (beatum esse velle), our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
Hannah Arendt
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#62. The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
Hannah Arendt
#63. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#64. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#65. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
Hannah Arendt
#66. The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
Hannah Arendt
#67. there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
Hannah Arendt
#68. We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
Hannah Arendt
#69. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#70. To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The
Hannah Arendt
#71. The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.
Hannah Arendt
#72. To sound off with a cheerful 'give me liberty or give me death' sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous.
Hannah Arendt
#73. Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
Hannah Arendt
#74. Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
#75. 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
#76. The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
Hannah Arendt
#77. To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.
Hannah Arendt
#78. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#79. Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
Hannah Arendt
#80. Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home.
Hannah Arendt
#81. Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
#82. The will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt
#83. [Justice] demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
Hannah Arendt
#84. Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
Hannah Arendt
#85. The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
Hannah Arendt
#86. 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
#87. The methods used for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself.
Hannah Arendt
#88. There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
Hannah Arendt
#89. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is forgery.
Hannah Arendt
#90. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#91. The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Hannah Arendt
#92. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rahter than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificied his life in vain.
Hannah Arendt
#93. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#94. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#95. 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 ...
Hannah Arendt
#96. Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.
Hannah Arendt
#97. Equality ... is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Hannah Arendt
#98. The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.
Hannah Arendt
#99. Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
Hannah Arendt
#100. 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.
Hannah Arendt
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