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There are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous.

— Hannah Arendt

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Notes from Wikiquote

Interview with Roger Errera (October 1973), broadcast on Un Certain Regard (6 July 1974), ORTF TV, France. Published as "The Last Interview" in the Hannah Arendt Newsletter #2 (December 1999) and Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melvin House, 2013).

Variants

version: There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.

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Mind

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.

Love and Saint Augustine (1929)

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)

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.

Men in Dark Times (1968)

Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone.

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

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 (1958)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hannah Arendt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.