Hannah Arendt

"Under conditions of totalitarianism, lies are not necessarily contrary to the truth."

"The only escape from the predicament of irreversibility and unpredictability is in the faculty of forgiveness."

"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it."

"The moment we no longer have a free press we no longer have a free country."

"Speech and action are the modes in which humans appear to each other."

"The crisis of education is pedagogical, not political."

"Propaganda and violence are not a priori invalid instruments of government."

"The human condition is characterized by natality, plurality, and worldliness."

"Every man can experience only that tiny fraction of the world's history which is contemporary with him."

"Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future."

"The boundary line between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things."

"The danger of totalitarianism lies not just in its practices but in its ideology."

"All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them."

"The public-private split is essential to human freedom."

"Tradition and authority are not the same; tradition can exist without authority."

"In the realm of human affairs, nothing is impossible."

"The trial revealed the banality of evil."

"A society can truly be said to be dysfunctional when it does not have genuine freedom of thought."

"Thought itself is dangerous and subversive."

"We are not discussing problems but asking questions about the human condition."

"The political realm rests on plurality, diversity, and mutual tolerance."

"Necessity and futility are the twin pillars of political action."

"The refugee has become the symbol of our age."

"True political dialogue requires the possibility of disagreement."

"The modern crisis consists largely in the loss of the private realm."

"Terror is the realization of the ideological content of totalitarianism."

"Politics begins when freedom begins."

"The human ability to forgive is what distinguishes us."

"We cannot escape our responsibility for our judgments and actions."

"The space of appearance is constituted by action and speech."