Top 300 Hannah Arendt Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an “experienced minority” which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from “the inexperienced majority.”

— Hannah Arendt

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

108. “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”

— Hannah Arendt

109. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

111. “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

112. “To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.”

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

114. “With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.”

— Hannah Arendt

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 193017 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.”

— Hannah Arendt

122. “For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.”

— Hannah Arendt

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

127. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

129. “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

130. “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

131. “Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann... On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.”

— Hannah Arendt

132. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Hannah Arendt

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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