Hannah Arendt Quotes on Truth
Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century German-American political theorist whose work shaped post-war thinking about totalitarianism, political action, and moral responsibility. This page collects quotes attributed to Hannah Arendt on the topic of truth, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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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"