Top 100 Hannah Arendt Quotes
#1. I edited that [men's adventure] stuff, I read it all. I went from that to The Saturday Evening Post. The very first day at the Post, I edited a piece by John O'Hara and Hannah Arendt. She said, 'Come on, vat are you doink?'
"I said, 'You're okay Arendt, but you're no Walter Kaylin.
Mel Shestack
#2. At the Nuremberg trials, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described the actions and the architects of the Holocaust with a simple, memorable phase--saying that the whole lot represented 'the banality of evil.' Her long ago words applied well to the man before us.
Michael Morton
#3. as eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt saw back in 1951: "Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.
Brooke Gladstone
#4. Bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt defined it: the rule of nobody. Roll
Joseph Heller
#5. Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
Studs Terkel
#6. What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.
Timothy Snyder
#7. Kovaly experienced the two supreme horrors of what Hannah Arendt called this terrible century.
Heda Margolius Kovaly
#8. Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.
Hannah Arendt
#9. Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.
Hannah Arendt
#10. To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin ... to set something into motion.
Hannah Arendt
#11. 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
#12. With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
#13. I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.
Hannah Arendt
#14. 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
#15. Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.
Hannah Arendt
#16. The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
Hannah Arendt
#17. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Hannah Arendt
#23. The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.
Hannah Arendt
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#29. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#30. 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
#31. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#32. The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
Hannah Arendt
#34. Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
Hannah Arendt
#35. The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.
Adam Kirsch
#36. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
Hannah Arendt
#37. The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.
Hannah Arendt
#38. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#39. 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
#40. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
Hannah Arendt
#41. Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.
Hannah Arendt
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Factual truth is always related to other people [ ... ]. It is political by nature.
Hannah Arendt
#46. Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
Hannah Arendt
#48. 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
#49. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within the national borders. For
Hannah Arendt
#50. For excellence, the presence of others is always required.
Hannah Arendt
#51. 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
#52. What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.
Hannah Arendt
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#56. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#57. 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
#58. Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning ...
Hannah Arendt
#59. A "divine people" lives in a world in which it is the born persecutor of all other weaker species, or the born victim of all other stronger species. Only the rules of the animal kingdom can possibly apply to its political destinies.
Hannah Arendt
#60. Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Hannah Arendt
#61. Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
Hannah Arendt
#62. Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.
Hannah Arendt
#63. Thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.
Hannah Arendt
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.
Hannah Arendt
#67. 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
#68. The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
Hannah Arendt
#69. The greatest revolutionary innovation, Madison's discovery of the federal principle for the foundation of large republics,
Hannah Arendt
#70. Of these, only the last, the crime against humanity, was new and unprecedented. Aggressive warfare is at least as old as recorded history, and while it has been denounced as "criminal" many times before, it has never been recognized as such in any formal sense.
Hannah Arendt
#71. It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
Hannah Arendt
#72. What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality - as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
Hannah Arendt
#73. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#74. What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!
Hannah Arendt
#75. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#76. Half of politics is "image-making", the other half the art of making people believe the imager
Hannah Arendt
#77. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#78. A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.
Hannah Arendt
#80. 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
#81. To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of "historical necessity," but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal. The
Hannah Arendt
#82. 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
#83. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Hannah Arendt
#84. Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
Hannah Arendt
#85. Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
Hannah Arendt
#86. The fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
Hannah Arendt
#87. Men in plural [ ... ] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
Hannah Arendt
#88. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Hannah Arendt
#89. Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.
Hannah Arendt
#90. The crime of the Nuremberg Laws was a national crime; it violated national, constitutional rights and liberties, but it was of no concern to the comity of nations.
Hannah Arendt
#91. Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
Hannah Arendt
#92. 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
#93. If we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.
Hannah Arendt
#94. The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
Hannah Arendt
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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.
Hannah Arendt
#98. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
Hannah Arendt
#99. Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.
Hannah Arendt
#100. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
Hannah Arendt
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