Quotes by

Hannah Arendt

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. – Hannah Arendt

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. – Hannah Arendt

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology. – Hannah Arendt

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. – Hannah Arendt

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country. – Hannah Arendt

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future. – Hannah Arendt

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on mans capacity for making promises and keeping them. – Hannah Arendt

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

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses. – Hannah Arendt

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 – Hannah Arendt

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. – Hannah Arendt

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. – Hannah Arendt

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. – Hannah Arendt

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods. – Hannah Arendt

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution. – Hannah Arendt

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. – Hannah Arendt

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… – Hannah Arendt

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented. – Hannah Arendt

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life. – Hannah Arendt

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil. – Hannah Arendt