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Hannah Arendt Quotes


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.

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

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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

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.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

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.

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

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.

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

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

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.

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.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

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

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.

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

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