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.
Hannah Arendt

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

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.
Hannah Arendt

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt

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

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.
Hannah Arendt

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Hannah Arendt

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.
Hannah Arendt

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

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
Hannah Arendt

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
Hannah Arendt

The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
Hannah Arendt

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Hannah Arendt

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

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

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.
Hannah Arendt

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

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