Johanna “Hannah” Cohn Arendt (1906–75) was a German-born American philosopher and political theorist. A Jewish refugee from Hitler, she is famous for her moral analysis of the 20th century’s cataclysmic history and her works of political philosophy.
Born in Hanover into a Jewish family, Arendt studied in the German existentialist tradition of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. She had an affair with Heidegger and, when he joined the Nazi Party and began implementing Nazi educational policies, she moved to Paris in 1933. She escaped the Nazi occupation to America in 1941.
In America, Arendt held several major academic posts, taught at the University of Chicago 1963–67, and subsequently at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Arendt’s first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951,) regarded the growth of totalitarianism as the outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. She argued that totalitarian regimes had revolutionized the social structure.
Arendt’s other books include The Human Condition (1958,) Between Past and Future (1961,) On Revolution (1963,) and On Violence (1970.) She is best remembered for Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963,) which expounded her idea of the ‘banality of evil’ arising from the 1963 trial of the German-Austrian Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
Arendt’s The Life of the Mind was published posthumously in 1978.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Hannah Arendt
Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Prophecy
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods—moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former—but no opinion.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Opinions, Opinion, Thought, Reason
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Violence
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
Topics: Necessity, Freedom
As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Hypocrisy
There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Writing, Storytelling
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
Topics: Economy, Economics
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
—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
Topics: Conversation, Speech, Politics
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Guilt
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
Topics: Criminals, Crime
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Beauty
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Luxury
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
Topics: Dying, Death
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Excess
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Forgiveness
The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Learning
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Love
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
—Hannah Arendt
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Guilt, Honesty
Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Solitude
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Words
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Fear, Survival, Anxiety
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
Topics: Colleges, Education, Universities
No civilization 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
Topics: Law, Lawyers
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Thinking
Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody’s assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Immortality
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love’s own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Family
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. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Truth, Wishes
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
Topics: Violence
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: World
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Revolutions, Revolution
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Effort
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
Topics: Reason
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Freedom
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Protest
Equality…is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Equality
It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Martin Heidegger German Existential Philosopher
Immanuel Kant Prussian German Philosopher
Erich Fromm German Social Philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche German Philosopher, Scholar
Adolf Hitler German Fascist Dictator
Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
Moses Mendelssohn German Jewish Philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer German Philosopher
Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi German Philosopher