Hannah Arendt

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

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.

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.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

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.

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.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.