The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. Hannah Arendt
It is far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than to think. Hannah Arendt
Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented. Hannah Arendt
The fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. Hannah Arendt
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. Hannah Arendt
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny. 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
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. 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
No civilization … would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other. Hannah Arendt
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. Hannah Arendt
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
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. Hannah Arendt
Action without a name, a ‘who’ attached to it, is meaningless. Hannah Arendt
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology. Hannah Arendt