Hannah Arendt Quotes

Every thought is an afterthought.

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

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.

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

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

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.

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

I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

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

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities . . . than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.

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.

It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.

The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.

Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself.

Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.

Violence is an expression of impotence.

To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.

For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.

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.

Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.

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.

Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.

The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.

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

For excellence, the presence of others is always required.

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.

Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.

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.

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.

The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.

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

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

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

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.

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

Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.

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.

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.

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.

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

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

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

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.