Top 300 Hannah Arendt Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature. When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life, they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin.”

— Hannah Arendt

252. “Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property. The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge to property as the foundation of society, as the limits of the globe are a challenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic.”

— Hannah Arendt

253. “Totalitarian politics – far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist – use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their strength and their propaganda value – the reality of class struggle, for instance, or the interest conflicts between Jews and their neighbors – have all but disappeared.”

— Hannah Arendt

254. “To sound off with a cheerful ‘give me liberty or give me death’ sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous.”

— Hannah Arendt

255. “Eichmann, though no legal expert, should have been able to appreciate that, for he knew from his own career that one could do as one pleased only with stateless people; the Jews had has to lose their nationality before they could be exterminated.”

— Hannah Arendt

256. “Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.”

— Hannah Arendt

257. “If the idea of humanity, of which the most conclusive symbol is the common origin of the human species, is no longer valid, then nothing is more plausible than a theory according to which brown, yellow, or black races are descended from some other species of apes than the white race, and that all together are predestined by nature to war against each other until they have disappeared from the face of the earth.”

— Hannah Arendt

258. “In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized.”

— Hannah Arendt

259. “The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.”

— Hannah Arendt

260. “Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even.”

— Hannah Arendt

261. “The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.”

— Hannah Arendt

262. “The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies – which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest – well-nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at home.”

— Hannah Arendt

263. “Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action.”

— Hannah Arendt

264. “Power was thought to be synonymous with economic capacity before people discovered that economic and industrial capacity are only its modern prerequisites. In a sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow convinced them that the state’s means of violence had to be used exclusively for protection of business interests and national property.”

— Hannah Arendt

265. “He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him.”

— Hannah Arendt

266. “Out of the slaughter of some 20,000 Communards, out of military defeat and economic collapse, what had in fact emerged was a regime whose capacity for government had been doubtful from its inception. So much, indeed, was this the case that within three years a society brought to the brink of ruin was clamoring for a dictator.”

— Hannah Arendt

267. “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

— Hannah Arendt

268. “Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted. In the work of great authors they lead into the very center of their work and are the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems and new insights.”

— Hannah Arendt

269. “What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people – the larger the better – in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer named. Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned.”

— Hannah Arendt

270. “In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.”

— Hannah Arendt

271. “For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

— Hannah Arendt

272. “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. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.”

— Hannah Arendt

273. “The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.”

— Hannah Arendt

274. “The fact is that the human capacity for life in the world always implies an ability to transcend and to be alienated from the processes of life itself, while vitality and liveliness can be conserved only to the extent that men are willing to take the burden, the toil and trouble of life, upon themselves.”

— Hannah Arendt

275. “Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.”

— Hannah Arendt

276. “To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.”

— Hannah Arendt

277. “The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.”

— Hannah Arendt

278. “They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world’s reality is actually expressed by their escape.”

— Hannah Arendt

279. “Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.”

— Hannah Arendt

280. “Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.”

— Hannah Arendt

281. “The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people’s national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.”

— Hannah Arendt

282. “Well, neither vanity nor the need for adoration – the sad substitute for the supreme confirmation of one’s existence which only love, mutual love, can give – belongs among the mortal sins; but they are unsurpassed prompters when we need suggestions for making fools of ourselves.”

— Hannah Arendt

283. “The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.”

— Hannah Arendt

284. “If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument.”

— Hannah Arendt

285. “No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.”

— Hannah Arendt

286. “On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.”

— Hannah Arendt

287. “To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of “historical necessity,” but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal. The.”

— Hannah Arendt

288. “Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capitals, the Nazis were confident that their best “propaganda” would be their racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and broken promises, they had never swerved for expediency’s sake.”

— Hannah Arendt

289. “The methods used for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself.”

— Hannah Arendt

290. “The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.”

— Hannah Arendt

291. “I met Auden late in his life and mine – at an age when the easy knowledgeable intimacy of friendships concluded in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with one another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends.”

— Hannah Arendt

292. “The scapegoat explanation therefore remains one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events. Equally.”

— Hannah Arendt

293. “It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain.”

— Hannah Arendt

294. “Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.”

— Hannah Arendt

295. “And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modern race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous. It is because equality demands that I recognize each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups, which for reasons of their own are reluctant to grant each other this basic equality, take on such terribly cruel forms.”

— Hannah Arendt

296. “The simultaneous decline of the European nation-state and growth of antisemitic movements, the coincident downfall of nationally organized Europe and the extermination of Jews, which was prepared for by the victory of antisemitism over all competing isms in the preceding struggle for persuasion of public opinion, have to be taken as a serious indication of the source of antisemitism. Modern.”

— Hannah Arendt

297. “What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of ‘good society’ as he knew it... His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which ‘good society’ everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to ‘close his ears to the voice of conscience,’ as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.”

— Hannah Arendt

298. “Man, who has not been granted the gift of undoing, who is always an un-consulted heir of other men’s deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequence of an unending chain of events rather than conscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future destiny seems to be concealed.”

— Hannah Arendt

299. “For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.”

— Hannah Arendt

300. “Moreover, as the Smolensk Archive spells out in detail, Stalin’s methods of rule succeeded in destroying whatever measure of competence and technical know-how the country had acquired after the October Revolution.”

— Hannah Arendt