Tyranny Quotes by Hannah Arendt

“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us,…

— 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…

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

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

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left…

— Hannah Arendt

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to…

— 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

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

— Hannah Arendt

“It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity,…

— Hannah Arendt

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

— Hannah Arendt