Hannah Arendt Quotes
Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century German-American political theorist whose work shaped post-war thinking about totalitarianism, political action, and moral responsibility. The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, traced the conditions that produced 20th-century totalitarian movements, while The Human Condition developed a philosophical anthropology of labour, work, and political action. The quotes below are attributed to Hannah Arendt, organized by topic.
Browse Hannah Arendt by topic
Hannah Arendt on Death
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“In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.”
Love and Saint Augustine(1929) | p. 17
Hannah Arendt on Freedom
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“No one has the right to obey . Paradoxical aphorism asserting the responsibility of everyone to engage in critical thinking in response to unjustly oppressive commands or demands against rationality or humanity , implying automatic obedience to tyranny as a betrayal of both, and referencing Immanuel Kant 's philosophical perspectives, in a radio interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964); also often rendered as " Niemand hat das Recht zu gehorchen.”
Kein Mensch hat das Recht zu gehorchen. -
“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.”
The Human Condition(1958) | The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16 -
“It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
The Human Condition(1958) | The Human Condition (1958)
Hannah Arendt on God
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“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.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | "Civil Disobedience"
Hannah Arendt on Justice
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“When all are guilty, no one is.”
Hannah Arendt on Knowledge
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“In politics , love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have neve”
Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962) -
“On Revolution (1963), ch. 2”
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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. -
“Kein Mensch hat das Recht zu gehorchen.”
No one has the right to obey . Paradoxical aphorism asserting the responsibility of everyone to engage in critical thinking in response to unjustly oppressive commands or demands against rationality or humanity , implying automatic obedience to tyranny as a betrayal of both, and referencing Immanuel Kant 's philosophical perspectives, in a radio interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964); also -
“Men in Dark Times (1968)”
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians. -
“In a head-on clash between violence and power , the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”
On Violence (1970) -
“The New Yorker (12 September 1970)”
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. -
“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.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | " Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary "
Hannah Arendt on Love
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“I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .”
Speaking of her book The Human Condition , as quoted in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, p. xxiv
Hannah Arendt on Mind
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can be realized in solitude.”
Hannah Arendt on Nature
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“The essence of totalitarian government , and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.”
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963) | As quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times
Hannah Arendt on Politics
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“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”
On Violence -
Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“Politics is not the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”
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“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
The New Yorker (12 September 1970) -
“Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”
Men in Dark Times (1968) -
“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.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | "On Violence" -
“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.”
Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books (1974) -
“The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951) | Part 3, Ch. 10
Hannah Arendt on Time
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“It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to ‘conquer space’ and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for ‘true reality’ that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena”
On scientific discovery, in Between Past and Future (1961) as quoted in Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times (4 December 2017) -
“The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.”
" Martin Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (1978) by Michael Murray, p. 294 -
“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.”
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963) | Epilogue
Hannah Arendt on Truth
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
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“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. 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.”
On Revolution (1963), ch. 2 -
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951) | On " alternate facts " -
“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | "On Violence" -
“For 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. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | "Lying in Politics"
Hannah Arendt on Virtue
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“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking -
Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“The banality of evil.”
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“Forgiveness is the only reaction which acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a re-action, something of the original character of action.”
Things actually not said by Hannah Arendt
A number of widely-shared lines are circulated as Hannah Arendt but are in fact from someone else. Did Hannah Arendt say these? No. Each entry below pairs the line with the person who actually wrote it.
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Did Hannah Arendt say this? No.
“Fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created. And if you get people to do that, you can convince them to do anything.”
Jason Stanley Vox interview is paraphrasing Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism quote on "mass propaganda... tactical cleverness."