Quote

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

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
Institutions
Soon
Democracy
Uphold
Living
Manifestations
Political
Ceases
Power
Decay
People
Manifestation
Cease

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

Image
Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.
Hannah Arendt
Image
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.
Hannah Arendt
Image
We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
Hannah Arendt
Image
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
Hannah Arendt
Image
While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.
Hannah Arendt
Image
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
Image
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility he can never admit an error.
Hannah Arendt
Image
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Hannah Arendt
Image
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home.
Hannah Arendt
Image
the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.
Hannah Arendt
Image
Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
Hannah Arendt
Image
The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.
Hannah Arendt
Image
His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
Hannah Arendt
Image
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
Image
the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.
Hannah Arendt
Image
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Hannah Arendt