Hannah Arendt

Born 14 October 1906 · Died 4 December 1975

From Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany · Nationality: United States, Prussia, statelessness · Writes nonfiction

German-American philosopher and political theorist

Quotes

“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”
The Life of the Mind 1978 , "Thinking"
“It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
The Human Condition
“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.”
Crises of the Republic
“The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.”
The Life of the Mind, p. 15
“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”
The Human Condition, Part 3

Books by Hannah Arendt in order

Books by Hannah Arendt in the order they were published, from The Burden of Our Time (1951) to Letters, 1925-1975 (2004).