Hannah Arendt

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Hannah Arendt

Biography : German-born American political theorist.
Born: 1906 - Died: 1975
Period:
20th century
Place of birth: Germany
Germany

Germany

Hannah Arendt - Quotes

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Hannah Arendt /

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but to begin something new.
Hannah Arendt /

Finding the right words at the right moment is action.
Hannah Arendt /

The best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.
Hannah Arendt /

to live

Unthinking people are like sleepwalkers.
Hannah Arendt /

to think

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
Hannah Arendt /

to think

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
Hannah Arendt /

For the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely upon other people.
Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism /

The meaning of politics is freedom.
Hannah Arendt /

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

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
Hannah Arendt

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
Hannah Arendt

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
Hannah Arendt

future

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
Hannah Arendt

freedom

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
Hannah Arendt

happiness

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt

Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.
Hannah Arendt

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst expect the best and take what comes.
Hannah Arendt

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
Hannah Arendt

death

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
Hannah Arendt

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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.
Hannah Arendt

truth

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Hannah Arendt

beauty

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

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Hannah Arendt

past

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

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

power

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
Hannah Arendt

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
Hannah Arendt

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt