Hannah Arendt Quotes - Page 2

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

One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

Violence is an expression of impotence.

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.

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.

the public sphere is as consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.

Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

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

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.

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.

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

Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.