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
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
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
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
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 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
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations… is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
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
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
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
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
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
—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
Topics: War
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
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 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: Lawyers, Law
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Fear, Survival, Anxiety
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Perfectionism
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
Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
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
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Justice
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Beauty
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
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
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
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 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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Obedience
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
—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, Politics, Speech
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
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: Reason, Opinion, Opinions, Thought
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
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
There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
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
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Thinking
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
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Luxury
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
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
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