Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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.
It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
— Hannah Arendt
Power Quotes
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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.
— Hannah Arendt
Philosophy
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.