The quotations of

Hannah Arendt

German-American political theorist and philosopher

1906–1975

10 quotes, most often on Government, Politics and Good & Evil.

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.
The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16
- Freedom
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
The New Yorker (12 September 1970)
- Change
- Politics
In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.
Love and Saint Augustine (1929), p. 17
- Life & Death
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
Crises of the Republic (1969)
- Politics
- Power
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.
Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books (1974)
- Change
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Part 3, Chapter 10
- Government
- Power
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
The Life of the Mind (1978), “Thinking”
- Good & Evil
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Epilogue
- Good & Evil
The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
- Government
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Ch. 11: The Totalitarian Movement
- Facts
- Truth & Lies

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