Hannah Arendt

"Totalitarianism attempts to make thinking superfluous."

"The distinction between public and private is fundamental to freedom."

"Hope is the virtue of the desperate."

"We are defined by our capacity to begin anew."

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

"We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights."

"Action, if it is to be free, must proceed from a firm foundation of general standards of right and wrong."

"Nobody has the right to obey."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

"Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history."

"Understanding and forgiving are not the same, but they are intimately related."

"The human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities is not the same as human life."

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

"Evil is the absence of thought."

"The trouble with lying and deceiving is that it requires a great deal of mental effort."

"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, through the state and machinery of violence; ultimately the power that we are looking at cannot rest content until it controls the very depths of the human soul."

"Natality, the human condition of being capable of beginning anew, is the antidote to totalitarianism."

"To live together in the world means essentially that a multiplicity of perspectives and stands coexist dynamically."

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen."

"Common sense is the political skill, the ability to take one's bearings in the political world."

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."

"We cannot escape the fact that that man is born for action; his action is the immediate reaction to the world around him."

"True education is a revolution in which the educator must also be transformed."

"The surest way to corruption is the accumulation of power."

"Plurality is the condition of all political life."

"Freedom as a political phenomenon means emancipation from the needs of life for entering into the spaciousness of political action."

"A person is political not because he possesses the gift of rational argument but because he is able to act and to speak."

"Only the Greeks discovered freedom and understood it as a political concept."

"Modernity has finally won."