Hannah Arendt famous quotes

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Forgiveness #Life Changing #Being Hurt

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

#Inspirational #Worry #Anticipation

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
-- Hannah Arendt

#War #Practice #Violence

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

#Inspirational #Peace #Character

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

#Motivational #Happiness #Being Happy

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

#Conviction #Form #Capacity

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

#Memorable #Political #Revolution

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Unique #Men #Differences

To think and to be fully alive are the same.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Thinking #Alive #Awareness

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

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

#Mistake #Thinking #Needs

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Promise #Way #Humans

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Liars #Lying #Wish

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

#Order #Trying #Goes On

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Peace #Power #Opposites

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Growth #One Day #May

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Memorable #Thinking #Atheism

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

#Simple #Thinking #Propose

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

#Integrity #Deeds #Company

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Reality #Expression #Phrases

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Action #Isolation #Capacity

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Art #Poetry #Inspired

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Numbers #Knowing #Pseudo

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

#Men #Make Sense #Meaningfulness

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

#Names #Action #Meaningless

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

#Creating #Violence

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Forever #Done #Deeds

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Life #Civilization #Legal System

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

#Future #Commitment #Broken Promises

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

#Diversity #Doers #Culture

It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Character #May #Something New

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

#Women #Thinking #Tyrants

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

#People #Culture #World

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Motivational #Country #Determination

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 indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Integrity #Hypocrite #Evil

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time
-- Hannah Arendt

#Love #Loving Life #Hands

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

#Men #Political #Speech

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Lying #Revolution #Action

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Peace #Civilization #Causes

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

#Way #Flow #Reverse

Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Anger #Mean #Earthquakes

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Nurse #Support #Nursery

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Twenties #Facts #Advantage

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

#Political #Events #Revolution

That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Beautiful #Party #Two

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Running #Risk #Today

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

#Love #Peace #Powerful

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

#Equality #Organization #Born

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

#People #Political #Truth Is

While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Spring #Men #Quality

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

#Past #Lost #Significance

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Alive #Facts #Impossible

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

#Men #Justice #Moral

It is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent
-- Hannah Arendt

#Depressing #Guilt #Repent

The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Strong #Order #Envy

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Peace #Mean #Coercion

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.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Peace #Winning #Men

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Fear #Survival #Emotion

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Secret #Victory #World

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

#World #Stakes

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wanderhelplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities--a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Lonely #Integrity #Heart

... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Truth #Moving #Men

The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into theheritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony--unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Political #Revolution #Forgotten

It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Meaningful #Freedom #Labor

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ...
-- Hannah Arendt

#Stories #Actors #Life Story

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

#Freedom #Human Nature #Determinism

... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Past #Men #Remember

... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Religious #Loss #Religion

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

#Life #Blessing

... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their bundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living;" such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is to the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Art #Work #People

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Thoughtful #Thinking #Action

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Children #Responsibility #Hands

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility──of being unable to undo what one has done──is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Men #Promise #Forgiving

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

#Doe

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Responsibility #Keys #Effort

Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Men #Frustration #Temptation

And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Action #Destruction #Violent

Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Death #Strong #Thoughtful

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt

#Past #Able #Oblivion