Top 300 Hannah Arendt Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.”

— Hannah Arendt

103. “The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.”

— Hannah Arendt

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them.”

— Hannah Arendt

107. “To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.”

— Hannah Arendt

108. “Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.”

— Hannah Arendt

109. “Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.”

— Hannah Arendt

110. “It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves – this would be like jumping over our own shadows.”

— Hannah Arendt

111. “In regard to the law of the state – that is, the accumulated power of society as monopolized by the state – there is no question of right or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society.”

— Hannah Arendt

112. “The more effective the chauvinistic propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments of violence.”

— Hannah Arendt

113. “Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand – in the same sense that I have understood – that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.”

— Hannah Arendt

114. “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say shallow.”

— Hannah Arendt

115. “Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.”

— Hannah Arendt

116. “Speaking is also a form of action.”

— Hannah Arendt

117. “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

— Hannah Arendt

118. “The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim.”

— Hannah Arendt

119. “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”

— Hannah Arendt

120. “Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.”

— Hannah Arendt

121. “The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

— Hannah Arendt

122. “There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.”

— Hannah Arendt

123. “The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.”

— Hannah Arendt

124. “It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.”

— Hannah Arendt

125. “Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.”

— Hannah Arendt

126. “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

— Hannah Arendt

127. “Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded. Such a man was Zola!”

— Hannah Arendt

128. “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet – and this is its horror – it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”

— Hannah Arendt

129. “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.”

— Hannah Arendt

130. “Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.”

— Hannah Arendt

131. “Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.”

— Hannah Arendt

132. “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”

— Hannah Arendt

133. “To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The.”

— Hannah Arendt

134. “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

135. “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

136. “Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.”

— Hannah Arendt

137. “In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.”

— Hannah Arendt

138. “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor.”

— Hannah Arendt

139. “For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”

— Hannah Arendt

140. “As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”

— Hannah Arendt

141. “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

142. “Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs – neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.”

— Hannah Arendt

143. “For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.”

— Hannah Arendt

144. “To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”

— Hannah Arendt

145. “The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him,” the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial.”

— Hannah Arendt

146. “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

147. “Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.”

— Hannah Arendt

148. “Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.”

— Hannah Arendt

149. “Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.”

— Hannah Arendt

150. “What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?”

— Hannah Arendt