Quotes from Hannah Arendt

Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.

To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.

The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.

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.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.

It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.

While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

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.

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.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

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.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

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.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.