"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: Hannah Arendt

• "By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road ..."
• "Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from ..."
• "Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of ..."
• "Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, ..."
• "Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse. "
• "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by ..."
• "Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. "
• "In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in ..."
• "It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once ..."
• "It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary ..."
• "It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! ..."
• "Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than ..."
• "Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, ..."
• "No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. ..."
• "Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what ..."
• "Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. ..."
• "Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no ..."
• "Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence ..."
• "Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable ..."
• "Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. "
• "The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition ..."

• "The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit ..."
• "The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon ..."
• "The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. "
• "The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can ..."
• "The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more ..."
• "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. "
• "The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which ..."
• "The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true. "
• "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up ..."
• "The Third World is not a reality but an ideology. "
• "The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear ..."
• "There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. "
• "This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the ..."
• "To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of ..."
• "To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a ..."
• "Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which ..."
• "Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a ..."
• "War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford. "
• "We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing ..."
• "What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations is its determination to ..."

• "Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible ..."
• "Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech ..."