Quotes by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

German-born American political theorist

Lived from: 1906 - 1975

Category: Philosophers Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 14 october 1906 Died: 4 december 1975

  • Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
  • Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
  • What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.

Quotes 1 till 20 of 29.

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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • Action without a name, a ''who'' attached to it, is meaningless.
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  • 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.
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  • Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
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  • 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.
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  • Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
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  • Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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  • Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods - moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former - but no opinion.
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  • 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.
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  • Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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  • The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
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  • 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
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  • The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the ''easy life of the gods'' would be a lifeless life.
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  • 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.
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  • The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from Hannah Arendt?

The two most famous quotes from Hannah Arendt are:

  • "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."
  • "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."

When did Hannah Arendt live?

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 and died in the year 1975.