Top 300 Hannah Arendt Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”

— Hannah Arendt

54. “Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.”

— Hannah Arendt

55. “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”

— Hannah Arendt

56. “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.”

— Hannah Arendt

57. “Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.”

— Hannah Arendt

58. “It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.”

— Hannah Arendt

59. “The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.”

— Hannah Arendt

60. “Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.”

— Hannah Arendt

61. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

— Hannah Arendt

62. “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

— Hannah Arendt

63. “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them...”

— Hannah Arendt

64. “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”

— Hannah Arendt

65. “The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.”

— Hannah Arendt

66. “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”

— Hannah Arendt

67. “No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.”

— Hannah Arendt

68. “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.”

— Hannah Arendt

69. “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

70. “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?”

— Hannah Arendt

71. “The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.”

— Hannah Arendt

72. “Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.”

— Hannah Arendt

73. “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.”

— Hannah Arendt

74. “There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.”

— Hannah Arendt

75. “While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”

— Hannah Arendt

76. “Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness, but develops and expands and finally, in the course of time and life, begins to constitute a little world of its own which is shared in friendship.”

— Hannah Arendt

77. “Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.”

— Hannah Arendt

78. “Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”

— Hannah Arendt

79. “Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become.”

— Hannah Arendt

80. “Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but – with disastrous effect – by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.”

— Hannah Arendt

81. “Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies,” “one against all,” that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.”

— Hannah Arendt

82. “Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.”

— Hannah Arendt

83. “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

84. “Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it.”

— Hannah Arendt

85. “If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.”

— Hannah Arendt

86. “It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.”

— Hannah Arendt

87. “Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.”

— Hannah Arendt

88. “Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”

— Hannah Arendt

89. “Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnis vita servitium est.”

— Hannah Arendt

90. “Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and state on one hand, between the nationals of an atomized society on the other. Native citizens of a nation-state frequently looked down upon naturalized citizens, those who had received their rights by law and not by birth, from the state and not from the nation...”

— Hannah Arendt

91. “The things of the world become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”

— Hannah Arendt

92. “The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.”

— Hannah Arendt

93. “Man’s chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.”

— Hannah Arendt

94. “Thought and action must never part company.”

— Hannah Arendt

95. “In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.”

— Hannah Arendt

96. “The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.”

— Hannah Arendt

97. “I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.”

— Hannah Arendt

98. “I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.”

— Hannah Arendt

99. “Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.”

— Hannah Arendt

100. “You think that you can judge what’s good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

— Hannah Arendt