Hannah Arendt Quotes

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has be...

there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that te...

What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social interco...

As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable...

It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third R...

Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among...

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but peo...

Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, s...

The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goe...

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringe...

Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President...

THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in his...

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

There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of t...

every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already ...

What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the bod...

The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish a...

In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; w...

The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which...

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history...

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is...

Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces tha...

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is esp...

Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happ...

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitat...

The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satis...

There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the vic...

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have...

Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human si...

The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned ...

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ult...

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same....

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the...

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

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

the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in...

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is r...

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither dep...

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of tempta...

And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by ...

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

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On ...

Love by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is ...

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

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

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different v...

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

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

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has be...

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion o...

Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our histo...

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appe...

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to th...

You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my o...

the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse...

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

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity ...

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In...

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can i...

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

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On ...

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst expect the best and take what comes...

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying ...

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercou...

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