Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined…

— Hannah Arendt

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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

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

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— Hannah Arendt

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for…

— 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

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

— Hannah Arendt

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

— Hannah Arendt

The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.

— Hannah Arendt

No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters…

— Hannah Arendt

Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

— Hannah Arendt

Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not…

— Hannah Arendt

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

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning…

— 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…

— Hannah Arendt

To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.

— 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