Top 300 Hannah Arendt Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror – namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.”

— Hannah Arendt

303. “It is one of the most promising and dangerous paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically. In the United States, social antisemitism may one day become the very dangerous nucleus for a political movement.”

— Hannah Arendt

304. “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

305. “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

306. “It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions.”

— Hannah Arendt

307. “The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.”

— Hannah Arendt

308. “Unfortunately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed.”

— Hannah Arendt

309. “The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.”

— Hannah Arendt

310. “Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.”

— Hannah Arendt

311. “The flourishing of historical and political legends came to a rather abrupt end with the birth of Christianity. Its interpretation of history, from the days of Adam to the Last Judgment, as one single road to redemption and salvation, offered the most powerful and all-inclusive legendary explanation of human destiny.”

— Hannah Arendt

312. “A “divine people” lives in a world in which it is the born persecutor of all other weaker species, or the born victim of all other stronger species. Only the rules of the animal kingdom can possibly apply to its political destinies.”

— Hannah Arendt

313. “A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne.”81.”

— Hannah Arendt

314. “Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defense, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate.”

— Hannah Arendt

315. “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

316. “A valid and comparatively permanent appointment would indeed presuppose the existence of a clique whose members would share the Leader’s monopoly of knowledge of what is going on, which the Leader must avoid by all means.”

— Hannah Arendt

317. “For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.”

— Hannah Arendt

318. “It now became clear that full national sovereignty was possible only as long as the comity of European nations existed; for it was this spirit of unorganized solidarity and agreement that prevented any government’s exercise of its full sovereign power.”

— Hannah Arendt

319. “Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.”

— Hannah Arendt

320. “What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery – the role of the Jewish people in world politics – and their chief interest – persecution of Jews all over the world – have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.”

— Hannah Arendt

321. “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

322. “It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.”

— Hannah Arendt

323. “No doubt, wherever public life and its law of equality are completely victorious, wherever a civilization succeeds in eliminating or reducing to a minimum the dark background of difference, it will end in complete petrifaction and be punished, so to speak, for having forgotten that man is only the master, not the creator of the world.”

— Hannah Arendt

324. “Because of their close relationship to state sources of power, the Jews were invariably identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and concentration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably suspected of working for the destruction of all social structures.”

— Hannah Arendt

325. “De werkloze arbeider haatte de nationaal-democratische partij, de onteigende kleine bezitter van de middenklasse en de hogere klasse haatten de traditionele extreem rechtse partijen. Deze massa van totaal ontgoochelde en wanhopige mensen groeide in Duitsland en Oostenrijk na de Eerste Wereldoorlog snel aan.”

— Hannah Arendt

326. “Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be. I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it.”

— Hannah Arendt

327. “Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”

— Hannah Arendt

328. “MANY STILL consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only.”

— Hannah Arendt

329. “For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility – based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men – is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.”

— Hannah Arendt

330. “Liberties in the sense of civil rights are the results of liberation, but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, whose essence is admission to the public realm and participation in public affairs.”

— Hannah Arendt

331. “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”

— Hannah Arendt

332. “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.”

— Hannah Arendt

333. “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.”

— Hannah Arendt

334. “We can no more master the past than we can undo it. But we can reconcile ourselves to it. The form for this is the lament, which arises out of all recollection.”

— Hannah Arendt

335. “Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races.”

— Hannah Arendt

336. “Whoever wants aid and protection from History, in which our insignificant birth is almost lost, must be able to know and understand it.”

— Hannah Arendt

337. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

— Hannah Arendt

338. “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