"Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -but no opinion."

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 cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that ..."
• "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. ..."
• "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 ..."