Hannah Arendt Quotes

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary whatever the punishment once a specific crime has appeared for the first time its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Equality is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.

Ideas as distinguished from events are never unprecedented.

Love by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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.

THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.