Hannah Arendt quotes

Hannah Arendt was a German-born political theorist and philosopher renowned for her work on totalitarianism and the nature of power. Her writings, such as "The Origins of Totalitarianism" and "Eichmann in Jerusalem," have had a profound impact on political thought. She is remembered for her analysis of the "banality of evil" and her deep reflections on freedom, authority, and responsibility. Here are 141 of her quotes:

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

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

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

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Hannah Arendt

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

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

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

Hannah Arendt

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

Hannah Arendt

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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.

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

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

Hannah Arendt

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Hannah Arendt

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

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 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

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

Action without a name, a "who” attached to it, is meaningless.

Hannah Arendt

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Hannah Arendt

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

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

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