Hannah Arendt

"The purpose of education is to prepare people for the realities of the world they will live in."

"Every society has the right to defend itself against those who would destroy it."

"The most dangerous form of government is the one that rules through the manipulation of language."

"Human freedom requires the possibility of failure."

"The miracle of human existence is that something new can always begin."

"Compassion is often the sign of a weak mind unable to grasp the justice of a situation."

"The dissolution of tradition does not mean the end of human life; it means the beginning of responsibility."

"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."

"The human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities does not add up to something called human nature."

"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; it wants to rule people's inner lives."

"Action, to be effective, must aim not at the distant future but at the immediate present."

"The difficulty is that nothing we use to understand natural processes helps us to understand political life."

"No one has the right to obey."

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

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil."

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

"The world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds through it."

"Our traditions are broken; we cannot fall back upon them; and we cannot proceed without them."

"The question of German guilt is the question of whether the German people bear a collective responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime."

"Politics is not a science but an art, and those who practice it are artists, not scientists."

"Understanding and forgiveness cannot frustrate the course of the world, but they can restore human dignity to those who have been stripped of it."

"Authority, as distinguished from power, can be preserved only by the consent of those who obey."

"The only solution to totalitarianism lies in maintaining the courage to think, speak, and act freely."

"We are never so vulnerable as when we believe ourselves to be right."

"The hope for change rests not in the masses but in the individual's capacity for independent thought."

"Public happiness cannot be pursued; it can only be gained as a byproduct of the engagement of free citizens."

"Evil rarely announces itself; it creeps in through the door left open by our indifference."

"The refugee reveals the hidden nature of the modern state: its indifference to human suffering."

"Language is the tool by which we make the world intelligible to ourselves."