63 Mind-Blowing Quotes By Hannah Arendt On Power, Politics And Philosophy
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
When 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.
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
![Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.](https://www.wisdomly.net/images/quotes/hannah-arendt-60057.jpg)
Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons
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.
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.
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ...
