Hannah Arendt
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Politics
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.Collection: Good
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.Collection: Freedom
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.Collection: Truth
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.Collection: Beauty
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.Collection: Future
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.Collection: Power
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.Collection: Best
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Power
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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.
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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.
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
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 chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
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.
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
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.
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.
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.Collection: People
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.Collection: Evil
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.Collection: Unique
Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.Collection: Equality
We are free to change the world and start something new in it.Collection: World
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.Collection: Truth
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.Collection: Conviction