Hannah Arendt Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame.

Hannah Arendt
Every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

Hannah Arendt
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.

Hannah Arendt
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

Hannah Arendt
The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

Hannah Arendt
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

Hannah Arendt
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.

Hannah Arendt
Kant... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.

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

Hannah Arendt
… the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.

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

Hannah Arendt
Kant... stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge... to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.

Hannah Arendt
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.

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

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

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

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

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