Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
Hannah Arendt
2
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
Hannah Arendt
3
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
Hannah Arendt
4
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Hannah Arendt
5
It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.
Hannah Arendt
6
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.
Hannah Arendt
7
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
Hannah Arendt
8
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.
Hannah Arendt
9
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
Hannah Arendt
10
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
Hannah Arendt
11
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt
12
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.
Hannah Arendt
13
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
Hannah Arendt
14
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
15
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
Hannah Arendt
16
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.
Hannah Arendt
17
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt
18
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
Hannah Arendt
19
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
20
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.
Hannah Arendt
21
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Hannah Arendt
22
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
Hannah Arendt
23
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
Hannah Arendt
24
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
Hannah Arendt
25
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
26
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt
27
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Hannah Arendt
