Famous Quotes

Quotes by Hannah Arendt

• By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
• 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.
• Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.
• 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.
• Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
• In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
• 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.
• The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
• 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.
• The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
• This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst expect the best and take what comes.
• 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.
• War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.