“ Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abunda… Hannah Arendt
“ The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility──of being unable to undo what one has done──is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of… Hannah Arendt
“ 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 w… Hannah Arendt
“ This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst expect the best and take what comes. Hannah Arendt
“ The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could pre… Hannah Arendt
“ The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the dist… Hannah Arendt
“ 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. Hannah Arendt
“ 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
“ The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it. 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
“ To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious. 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
“ There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits. Hannah Arendt
“ 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
