Hannah Arendt People Quotations

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Factual truth is always related to other people [...]. It is political by nature.

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.

For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not , just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere . Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

The true dividing line between people is whether they are capable of being in love with their destiny.

Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.