Hannah Arendt Quotes

Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Speech is what makes man a political being.

The greatest form of expression - or, at least, the most common that we have as human beings, what separates us from the animals - is speaking: the ability to communicate.

I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Most of us do not use speech to express thought. We use it to express feelings.

There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another.

As Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist, said: "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." You need the truth, and you also need a demand, and you need to bring that demand into the realm of electoral politics. If you don't do that, it's very hard to get such an entrenched machine to move.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

I'm an affectionate person I'm a person who hugs, hugs people and I shake hands.

A language is everything you do.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.

In my opinion, using different kinds of epithets and adjectives in connection with the word democracy is a sign of mere hypocrisy, to put it mildly. Either there's democracy, or there isn't.

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.

The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.

Another good thing about gossip is that it is within everybody's reach, And it is much more interesting than any other form of speech.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.