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 Past
Born
October 14, 1906
Died
December 4, 1975
Quotes
282
Rank
#122

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Hannah Arendt quotes (page 4 of 15)

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

Hannah Arendt Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant in this respect almost alone among the philosophers was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications."

Stupid Philosophy Exercise
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"Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence."

Growth One Day May
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"The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man."

Men Essence Humanity
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"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition."

Nature Earth Quintessence
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"Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature."

People Political Truth Is
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"Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world."

Children Responsibility Our World
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"What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing"

Simple Thinking Propose
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"If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it."

Wise Wisdom Knows
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"There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will."

Eye Ill Will Hands
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"There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive."

Lying Order Lines
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"the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."

Government Tyrants Political
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"By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality."

Beautiful Reality Isolated
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"To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know."

Mistake Thinking Needs
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"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance."

Peace Power Opposites
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"Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and ... such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth."

Hero Men Light
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"As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake."

Diversity Culture Citizens
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"The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object."

Numbers Knowing Development
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"The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim."

Children Yesterday Police
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"No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other."

Life Law Civilization
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