HANNAH ARENDT

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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.

Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You deserve delight.

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

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.

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

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.