Politics Quotes by Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.

— Hannah Arendt

The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.

— Hannah Arendt

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has…

— Hannah Arendt

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the…

— 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

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic…

— Hannah Arendt

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.

— Hannah Arendt

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a…

— Hannah Arendt

In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked…

— 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

every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion.…

— Hannah Arendt

There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are…

— Hannah Arendt

Political institutions, no matter how well or badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the…

— Hannah Arendt

The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into theheritage of…

— Hannah Arendt

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only…

— Hannah Arendt

By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to…

— Hannah Arendt

It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political talents can assert themselves only in rare cases, and…

— Hannah Arendt

Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by…

— Hannah Arendt

Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be…

— Hannah Arendt

“The revolutionary movements of the left, which fought for a radical change of social conditions, had never directly touched this supreme political…

— Hannah Arendt

the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is…

— Hannah Arendt

“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between…

— Hannah Arendt

“Totalitarian politics—far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist—use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the…

— Hannah Arendt

“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is…

— Hannah Arendt

“Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them…

— Hannah Arendt

“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

“This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this…

— Hannah Arendt

“Somehow it was not the fault of the born adventurers, of those who by their very nature dwelt outside society and outside…

— Hannah Arendt

“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off…

— Hannah Arendt

“Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative…

— Hannah Arendt