Hannah Arendt

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.

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

The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.

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.

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

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

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

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

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

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

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.

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.

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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.

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.