Hannah Arendt

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

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The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

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Where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.

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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could have been.

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Thought . . . is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately . . . no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

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To abolish the fences of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man’s liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom.

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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

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Power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.

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Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.

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[l]t is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions.

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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.

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[Wjhatever 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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

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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.

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[Gjoodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.

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Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status” without which the very words “mankind" or "humanity” would be devoid of meaning.

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The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.

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

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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions.

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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless.

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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

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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.

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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

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Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.

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Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

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Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

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The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

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our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

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To think and to be fully alive are the same.

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Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.

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A poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

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Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able . . . to keep myself company.

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The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself.

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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.

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

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

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