Quote

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Hannah Arendt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Inevitably
Directly
Revolution
Beginning
Events
Political
Problem
Revolutions
Confront

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

Image
If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
Image
It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
Hannah Arendt
Image
It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
Hannah Arendt
Image
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
Hannah Arendt
Image
It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
Hannah Arendt
Image
A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
Hannah Arendt
Image
where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.
Hannah Arendt
Image
It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adageThere is no alternative to victory retains a high degree of plausibility.
Hannah Arendt
Image
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
Image
We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
Hannah Arendt
Image
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
Hannah Arendt