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Hannah Arendt Quotes

Total quotes: 27
“Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.”
— Hannah Arendt, You Can Be Happy: The Scientifically Proven Way to Change How You Feel
Tagged: Dedicate, Deserve, Good Things, Self-Love, Passion, Peace Of Mind
“Heidegger lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.”
— Hannah Arendt, No More Heidegger
“The technical development of implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.”
— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence
Tagged: New Kinds Of Geopolitical War
“The aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to prove that its respective supersense has been right.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Tagged: Totalitarianism, Danger of Systems, Dangerous Ideals, Homogeneity, Christian Science, Universalism
“Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Vols 1&2
Tagged: Thought vs. Judgement, Thinking, Thought
“You see in Kant a clash between the principle according to which you act and the principle according to which you judge.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Vols 1&2
Tagged: Deep Thought Issues, Judgment, Moral Codes
“Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Tagged: History, Theory and Practice
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
— Hannah Arendt
Tagged: Sad Quotes
“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time”
— Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
Tagged: Love, Life Is A Journey, Architecture Of Happiness, Mindfullness
“I write with both reckless optimism and reckless despair. I believe that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Tagged: Liberal In Despair, Progress, The Nature of Progress, Doom, My Philosophy
“Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Tagged: first lines of books
“Reason comes from the Latin ratio, derived from the verb reor, ratus sum, which means to calculate and also ratiocinate.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Vols 1&2
Tagged: Etymology, Word Orgins
“The meaning of what actually happens and appears while it is happening is revealed when it has disappeared. ”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Vols 1&2
Tagged: How Memory Works, Words & Actions, Narrative Fallacy, Thought vs. Action
“Where all are guilty, however, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are always the best possible safeguard against the discovery of the actual culprits.”
— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence
Tagged: The Bureaucracy Of Our Confession, Collective Guilt
“The real rift between black and white is not healed when it is being translated into an even less reconcilable conflict between collective innocence and collective guilt.”
— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence
Tagged: Rifts of Guilt
“We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius or whether it is the day dream of those who are not geniuses.”
— Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Tagged: Life, Self-Help
“The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind(Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (Vols 1&2)
Tagged: Why We Reason, Logic Against Logic, Truth Is Not What Matters, Meaning Is Existential (Not Logical)
“It is not our soul but our mind that demands speech.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind(Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (Vols 1&2)
Tagged: Where Speech Comes From, Why We Talk
“Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story... Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: Second Edition
Tagged: Authorship, Death of The Author
“Generalization is inherent in every thought. ”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Vols 1&2
Tagged: Generalization, How Thinking Works
“In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only so long as the power structure of the government is intact—that is, so long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to risk their lives and use their weapons.”
— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence
Tagged: Weapons of Politics
“Do not forget me, and do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life. This knowledge cannot be shaken, not even today, when, as a way out of my restlessness, I have found a home and a sense of belonging with someone about whom you might understand it least of all.

I kiss your brow and your eyes,

Your Hannah”
— Hannah Arendt, Letters: 1925-1975
Tagged: Stunning Love Letters
“If one looks at this record with eyes unclouded by theories and traditions, religious or secular, it is certainly hard to escape the conclusion that philosophers seem genetically unable to come to terms with certain phenomena of the mind and its position in the world, that we can no more trust men of thought to arrive at a fair estimate of human action. ”
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Vols 1&2
Tagged: Theory and Practice, Theory And Praxis, Thought & Action, Thought & Will
“The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: Second Edition
Tagged: Identity
“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence
Tagged: Against Bureaucracy, Against Massive Universalist Governing Systems, Bureaucracy
“Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children to their death; how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed? Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Tagged: Framework Foundations, Governing Frameworks, Totalitarian, Conditioning, Societal Construction
“To resort to violence in view of outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of the immediacy and swiftness inherent in it. It goes against the grain of rage and violence to act with deliberate speed; but this does not make it irrational. On the contrary, in private as well as public life. The point is not that this will permit us to let off steam—which indeed can be equally well done by pounding the table or by finding another substitute. The point is that under certain circumstances violence, which is to act without argument or speech and without reckoning with consequences, is the only possibility of setting the scales of justice right again. (Billy Budd striking dead the man who bore false witness against him is the classic example.) In this sense, rage and the violence that sometimes, not always, goes with it belong among the ‘natural’ human emotions, and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him.”
— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence
Tagged: Understanding Violence, Violence
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