Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

Philosopher, Political Theorist

Hannah Arendt was a political theorist known for her works on totalitarianism, authority, and the nature of power, particularly in 'The Human Condition.'

Men Thinking Political World Evil People
Born
October 14, 1906
Died
December 4, 1975
Quotes
282
Rank
#122

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Hannah Arendt quotes (page 13 of 15)

282 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Hannah Arendt Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world."

Heart Essence Political
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"When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head."

Doe Cease
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"Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror."

Order Giving Facts
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"every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power."

Power Political Expansion
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"It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of ‘destiny,’ you not only change its ‘natural laws’ but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate."

Fate Destiny Law
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"They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world's reality is actually expressed by their escape."

Running Reality World
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"Just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation."

Country Men Law
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"Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be."

Death Strong Thinking
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"Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents."

Frustration Men Temptation
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"The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved."

Art Conflict
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"It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think."

Thinking Ordinary Demand
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"Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances."

Nature Keys Law
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"If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with […] [the desert] of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms."

Practice Storm Desert
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"To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox."

Witty Power Speak
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"While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse."

Spring Men Quality
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"His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well."

Uprising Political Needs
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"The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before."

Morning Night Thinking
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"What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!"

Subjects Our Thoughts
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"Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx."

Plato Believe Teaching
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"For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death."

Men Race Humanity
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