Quotes By Hannah Arendt

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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

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

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

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.

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

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.

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 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.

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

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

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

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

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.

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 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.

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

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

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