Hannah Arendt Quotes

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

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

In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of succcessful businessmen.

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

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

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.

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.

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

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

Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.

A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.

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

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.

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

We all carry fault within.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

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.

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.

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

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving.

The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.

Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.

No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.

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

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

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

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

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.

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

thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.

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.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

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.

What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.

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

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.

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

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

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

It is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent

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.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

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

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.