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
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Loyalty
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
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
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
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Twentieth Century, Authority
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
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
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
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: Economics, Economy
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
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Fashion
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Propaganda
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
Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Beauty
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Storytelling, Writing
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: Freedom, Necessity
Fame comes in many sorts and sizes, from the one-week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name.
—Hannah Arendt
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Promises
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
It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
Luck serves … as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Fortune, Luck
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: Honesty, Guilt
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
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
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
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, Universities, Education
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
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
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