As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. 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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Hypocrisy
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Speech, Conversation, Politics
Fame comes in many sorts and sizes, from the one-week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name.
—Hannah Arendt
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
Topics: Guilt
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Words
Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Promises
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
—Hannah Arendt
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
Topics: Obedience
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
Topics: Excess
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
Topics: Freedom, Necessity
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Honesty, Guilt
Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Prophecy
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Loyalty
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Evil
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Thinking
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Forgiveness
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
Topics: Authority, Twentieth Century
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
—Hannah Arendt
Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Solitude
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
Topics: Reason
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Violence
Luck serves … as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Fortune, Luck
Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Action
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Forgiveness
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
Topics: Justice
Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody’s assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Immortality
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Propaganda
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
Topics: Fashion
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.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Truth, Wishes
It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Tyranny
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Martin Heidegger German Existential Philosopher
- Immanuel Kant Prussian German Philosopher
- Erich Fromm German Social Philosopher
- Friedrich Nietzsche German Philosopher, Scholar
- Adolf Hitler German Fascist Dictator
- Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
- Moses Mendelssohn German Jewish Philosopher
- Arthur Schopenhauer German Philosopher
- Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
- Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi German Philosopher
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