Top 283 Quotes & Sayings by Hannah Arendt

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

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.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

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

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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

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.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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.

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.

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

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

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

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

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.

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.

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.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

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.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

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.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

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.

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.

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.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

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

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

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.

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.

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.