Hannah Arendt quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Hannah Arendt on Wise Famous Quotes.

The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.

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

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

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

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

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

The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.

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

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

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

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

The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons

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

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

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

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

Where everybody is guilty, nobody is.

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

Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.

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

...and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.

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

Men in plural [ ... ] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.

Thought and action must never part company.

The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.

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

Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.

Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing

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

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

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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

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

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

Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.

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

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

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

To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics ...

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

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

Violence is an expression of impotence.

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

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

For excellence, the presence of others is always required.

We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.

Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.

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

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

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.

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

[The] artisans [ ... ] men whose chief interest is their craft and not the market place.

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

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

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

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

We all carry fault within.

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

Every thought is an afterthought.

Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

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

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.

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

Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states.

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

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

Every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

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

If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

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

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality - whatever it may be.

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.

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

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

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.

The conflict between art and politics ... cannot and must not be solved.

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them 'children'.

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

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

To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

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

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