Hannah Arendt Quotes

To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Despotism is a long crime.

They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers … call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

From this day the presidency of Mexico ends. The dictatorship of Mexico begins.

The rule of several bad men does not last long, and easily decays to the rule of a single tyrant.

… the meanest and worst of all forms of government

One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

Absolute power is absolute power, no matter what it's called.

Fascism is the consequence of economic jam and dictatorship is the product of Fascism, for Fascism cannot be managed save by a dictator.

Fear must rule in a despotism.

Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.

In my view dictators do not surrender. They have to be well and truly defeated.

Fascism was little more than terrorist rule by corrupt gangsters. Mussolini was not corrupt himself but he did nothing except to rage impotently.

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

There will be no more protests. No more dissension. No more violence. There will be only one voice. The voice of Ravinia. The voice of Halla. Your voice." "There goes freedom of speech," I said.

Hitler, who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil genius. It is true that in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, he found a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends.

Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.