Quotes from Hannah Arendt

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.

I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

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.

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities . . . than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it.

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

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.

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

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.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.