110+ Hannah Arendt Quotes On Evil, Power And Thinking

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist. She is best known for her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which examined the causes of totalitarianism in the 20th century. Arendt is also known for her controversial coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which was published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Hannah Arendt on evil, power, thinking.

Top 10 Hannah Arendt Quotes

1. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
2. When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.
3. The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
4. Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
5. There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
6. There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
7. Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
8. Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
9. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
10. Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Hannah Arendt Image Quotes

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. — Hannah Arendt

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. — Hannah Arendt

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. — Hannah Arendt

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Short Quotes

• In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
• The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
• Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
• Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.
• Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
• Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.
• War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
• Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.
• Every thought is an afterthought.
• It is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Evil

[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer. — Hannah Arendt

the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun. — Hannah Arendt

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force. — Hannah Arendt

You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so. — Hannah Arendt

Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing? — Hannah Arendt

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Power

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. — Hannah Arendt

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. — 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

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

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

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. — Hannah Arendt

Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it. — Hannah Arendt

It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength. — Hannah Arendt

The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality. — Hannah Arendt

power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Thinking

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about. — Hannah Arendt

thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think. — Hannah Arendt

Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think. — Hannah Arendt

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easer to act than to think. — Hannah Arendt

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing. — Hannah Arendt

Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all. — Hannah Arendt

It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think. — Hannah Arendt

Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results. — Hannah Arendt

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it. — Hannah Arendt

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Education

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world. — Hannah Arendt

Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Freedom

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence. — Hannah Arendt

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

the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did. — Hannah Arendt

His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well. — 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

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

The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom. — 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 higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Violence

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. — Hannah Arendt

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim. — Hannah Arendt

Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. — Hannah Arendt

Violence is an expression of impotence. — Hannah Arendt

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

Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power. — Hannah Arendt

The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Political

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. — Hannah Arendt

There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive. — Hannah Arendt

Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature. — Hannah Arendt

In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of succcessful businessmen. — Hannah Arendt

Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered. — 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

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. — Hannah Arendt

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx. — Hannah Arendt

It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political talents can assert themselves only in rare cases, and it is even rarer that the specifically political qualifications survive the petty maneuvers of party politics with its demands for plain salesmanship. — Hannah Arendt

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About World

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. — Hannah Arendt

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake. — Hannah Arendt

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. — Hannah Arendt

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it. — Hannah Arendt

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology. — Hannah Arendt

Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake. — Hannah Arendt

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves. — Hannah Arendt

Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity. — Hannah Arendt

They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world's reality is actually expressed by their escape. — Hannah Arendt

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Life

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 — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life. — Hannah Arendt

Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes. — Hannah Arendt

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. — 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 subject. — Hannah Arendt

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame. — Hannah Arendt

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense. — Hannah Arendt

Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself. — Hannah Arendt

To think and to be fully alive are the same. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Quotes About Action

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless. — Hannah Arendt

Thought and action must never part company. — Hannah Arendt

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. — Hannah Arendt

Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic. — Hannah Arendt

Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required. — Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt Famous Quotes And Sayings

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed. — Hannah Arendt

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. — Hannah Arendt

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. — Hannah Arendt

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. — 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. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality. — 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. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

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

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever. — 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

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

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 -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -but no opinion. — Hannah Arendt

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. — Hannah Arendt

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

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object. — Hannah Arendt

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other. — 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

A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals. — Hannah Arendt

Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound. — Hannah Arendt

the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies. — Hannah Arendt

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility. — Hannah Arendt

Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while. — Hannah Arendt

No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable. — Hannah Arendt

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. — 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

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving. — Hannah Arendt

Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended. — Hannah Arendt

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

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth. — Hannah Arendt

The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. — Hannah Arendt

What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience. — 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. — Hannah Arendt

Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity" would be devoid of meaning. — Hannah Arendt

Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor. — Hannah Arendt

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. — Hannah Arendt

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

The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible. — 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. — Hannah Arendt

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere. — Hannah Arendt

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions. — Hannah Arendt

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

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented. — Hannah Arendt

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

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. — Hannah Arendt

Life Lessons by Hannah Arendt

1. Hannah Arendt teaches us to think for ourselves and to be critical of the world around us. She encourages us to take responsibility for our actions and to strive for justice.
2. She emphasizes the importance of understanding the past in order to shape the future, and to not be complacent in the face of injustice.
3. Lastly, she reminds us of the power of storytelling and how it can help us to better understand the world and our place in it.