Hannah Arendt Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

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

Hannah Arendt
Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization — the man-made artifact to house successive generations — would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

Hannah Arendt
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

Hannah Arendt
Thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

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

Hannah Arendt
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

Hannah Arendt
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.

Hannah Arendt
Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.

Hannah Arendt
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either good or evil.

Hannah Arendt
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

Hannah Arendt
The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then—but from that moment on—will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

Hannah Arendt
If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

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

Hannah Arendt
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.

Hannah Arendt
Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.

Hannah Arendt
What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.

Hannah Arendt
The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

Hannah Arendt
The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

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

Hannah Arendt
I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.

Hannah Arendt
For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.

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

Hannah Arendt
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Of Adolf Eichmann

Hannah Arendt
The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies — which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest — well-nigh impossible.

Hannah Arendt
The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.

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

Hannah Arendt
Kant … stated that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge … to make room for faith, but all he had denied was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

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

Hannah Arendt
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.

Hannah Arendt
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

Hannah Arendt