Hannah Arendt Quotes

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When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood.... Wealth and economic...

By Hannah Arendt
The blessing of life as a whole ... can never be found in work.

By Hannah Arendt
Power corrupts ... when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power ... far from being a characteris...

By Hannah Arendt
Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will's ...

By Hannah Arendt
It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other high...

By Hannah Arendt
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own dev...

By Hannah Arendt
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subj...

By Hannah Arendt
... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for ...

By Hannah Arendt
... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction between our present...

By Hannah Arendt
... the space left to freedom is very small. ... ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.

By Hannah Arendt
... the word 'education' has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the u...

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

By Hannah Arendt
If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: How do you want the world to be in fifty years? and What do you want your life to be like five years from now? the answers are quite often preceded by Provided there is still a world and Provided I am still alive. To the often-heard question, Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.

By Hannah Arendt
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

By 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.

By 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.

By 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.

By 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.

By Hannah Arendt
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.

By Hannah Arendt
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.

By Hannah Arendt
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.

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

By Hannah Arendt
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 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. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been

By 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.

By 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

By 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.

By Hannah Arendt
What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.

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

By Hannah Arendt
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

By Hannah Arendt
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.

By Hannah Arendt