Hannah Arendt Quotes (72 Quotes)


    Freedom from labor itself is not new it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

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

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

    The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and to this category the.

    Only one who is in pain really senses nothing but himself pleasure does not enjoy itself but something beside itself.


    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.

    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.

    Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.

    When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of ''happiness'' has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.

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

    As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can inde.

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

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

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

    Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

    Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

    Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence ... the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

    War has . . . become a luxury which only the small nations can afford.

    Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former but no opinion.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.

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

    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.

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

    The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

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

    What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.

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

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

    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.

    The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

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

    To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities ... than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

    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.

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

    No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.


    More Hannah Arendt Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Liberty & Freedom - World - Life - Politics - Mind - Crime - Actions - War & Peace - Revolution - Good & Evil - Love - Happiness - Necessity - Money & Wealth - Sense & Perception - Countries - Tyranny & Despotism - Reality - Thought & Thinking - View All Hannah Arendt Quotations

    Related Authors


    Lord Acton - Will Durant - Tacitus - Stephen Ambrose - Michel Foucault - James Mill - Iris Chang - Herodotus - Henry Adams - Harold Acton


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