Hannah Arendt Quotes

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Everyone I vote for never wins. Welcome to America.

I really found this campaign odious. I couldn't get up for it. The quality of the candidates and the campaign, I just found the whole thing second-rate. I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

The meaning of life is life.

After many, many years, I fell out of love with politics. It's not something I like but it's the truth.

I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

God, George Bush makes me want to slash my wrists. He's so embarrassing I have to leave the room when he's on the news. What a monkey.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Change: In politics, the substitution of one disappointment for another.

Americans expect too much of politics.

I once had considerable expectations from Congress, But since they adopted the fiery resolves of … Massachusetts, all hope of good from them has vanished

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

Politics in America is like stale bread. It's so yada yada that the best among us can hardly stand it.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

I thought I was going to go into politics, but that became disheartening. You see that a lot of stuff doesn't get done, people walk around all self-important, and it's just depressing.

Politics is a waste of time.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

Life is just a bag of pot.