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
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
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
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
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
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
Equality…is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Equality
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: Crime, Criminals
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
—Hannah Arendt
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
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
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Propaganda
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Anxiety, Survival, Fear
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
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
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Beauty
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
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 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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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 far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
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
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
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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