Hannah Arendt

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 earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

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.

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.

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

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.