Hannah Arendt Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
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.
What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.
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
It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
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.
...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.
It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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.
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.
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.
Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.