Hannah Arendt Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.

Hannah Arendt
The disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.

Hannah Arendt
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.

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
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

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

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

Hannah Arendt
Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

Hannah Arendt
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and... such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.

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

Hannah Arendt
For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Hannah Arendt
It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of 'destiny,' you not only change its 'natural laws' but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate.

Hannah Arendt
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

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
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival; it indicates danger, and without this warning sense no living thing could last long. The courageous man is not one whose soul lacks this emotion or who can overcome it once and for all, but one who has decided that fear is not what he wants to show.

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

Hannah Arendt
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.

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

Hannah Arendt
There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Hannah Arendt
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.

Hannah Arendt
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.

Hannah Arendt
As citizens, we must prevent wrong-doing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong-sufferer, and spectator, is at stake; the City has been wronged.

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
It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

Hannah Arendt
It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

Hannah Arendt