Hannah Arendt Quotes

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army.

Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

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.