Top 300 Hannah Arendt Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

— Hannah Arendt

2. “To think and to be fully alive are the same.”

— Hannah Arendt

3. “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.”

— Hannah Arendt

4. “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”

— Hannah Arendt

5. “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

— Hannah Arendt

6. “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

— Hannah Arendt

7. “One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.”

— Hannah Arendt

8. “Every thought is an afterthought.”

— Hannah Arendt

9. “Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”

— Hannah Arendt

10. “Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”

— Hannah Arendt

11. “The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”

— Hannah Arendt

12. “For excellence, the presence of others is always required.”

— Hannah Arendt

13. “Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power...”

— Hannah Arendt

14. “Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.”

— Hannah Arendt

15. “Violence is an expression of impotence.”

— Hannah Arendt

16. “Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.”

— Hannah Arendt

17. “To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.”

— Hannah Arendt

18. “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

19. “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

— Hannah Arendt

20. “When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.”

— Hannah Arendt

21. “The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.”

— Hannah Arendt

22. “The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.”

— Hannah Arendt

23. “One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

— Hannah Arendt

24. “If we don’t know our own history, we are deemed to live it.”

— Hannah Arendt

25. “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.”

— Hannah Arendt

26. “The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.”

— Hannah Arendt

27. “The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.”

— Hannah Arendt

28. “The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.”

— Hannah Arendt

29. “Since one cannot educate adults, the word “education” has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.”

— Hannah Arendt

30. “Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity.”

— Hannah Arendt

31. “We are free to change the world and start something new in it.”

— Hannah Arendt

32. “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

— Hannah Arendt

33. “Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.”

— Hannah Arendt

34. “Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.”

— Hannah Arendt

35. “Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

— Hannah Arendt

36. “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”

— Hannah Arendt

37. “Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.”

— Hannah Arendt

38. “Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.”

— Hannah Arendt

39. “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

40. “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.”

— Hannah Arendt

41. “Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.”

— Hannah Arendt

42. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

— Hannah Arendt

43. “Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.”

— Hannah Arendt

44. “If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

— Hannah Arendt

45. “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”

— Hannah Arendt

46. “The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”

— Hannah Arendt

47. “Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.”

— Hannah Arendt

48. “In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.”

— Hannah Arendt

49. “Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.”

— Hannah Arendt

50. “Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”

— Hannah Arendt