Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

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

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

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.