The Best Hannah Arendt quotes

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. — Hannah Arendt

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

Every thought is strictly speaking an after–thought. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

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

Thought and action must never part company. — Hannah Arendt

Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all. — Hannah Arendt

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought. — Hannah Arendt

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

Power can be thought of as the never–ending, self–feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

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. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

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

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival. — Hannah Arendt

If we don’t know our own history, we are deemed to live it. — Hannah Arendt

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

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics. — Hannah Arendt

The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

Since one cannot educate adults, the word ‘education’ has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans. — Hannah Arendt

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. — Hannah Arendt

Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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. — Hannah Arendt

I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world… Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi . — Hannah Arendt

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

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

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil. — Hannah Arendt

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it. — Hannah Arendt

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

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. — Hannah Arendt

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it–the quality of temptation. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

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

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. — Hannah Arendt

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

Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two–in–one, without being able to keep myself company. — Hannah Arendt

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

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. — Hannah Arendt

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

To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox. — Hannah Arendt

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

The fateful equating of power with violence, of The political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

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

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them. — Hannah Arendt

Although tyranny…may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people. — Hannah Arendt

Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power. — Hannah Arendt

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

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

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

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

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

The business of thinking … undoes every morning what it had finished the night before. — Hannah Arendt

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

Kant … discovered ‘the scandal of reason,’ that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about. — Hannah Arendt

Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results. — Hannah Arendt

Thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think. — Hannah Arendt

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. — Hannah Arendt

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