Hannah Arendt Quotes

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

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

"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 earth is the very quintessence of the human condition."

"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."

"Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse."

"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."

"The Third World is not a reality but an ideology."

"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."

"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."

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

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."

"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."