"Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible."
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Hannah Arendt quotes (page 5 of 15)
282 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party."
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"The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution."
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"Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required."
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"Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them."
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"Thought and action must never part company."
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"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think."
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"Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false-not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats."
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"In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of succcessful businessmen."
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"Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses."
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"As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
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"Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life."
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"Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power."
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"Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."
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"Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future."
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"With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality."
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"Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it."
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"Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered."
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"Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company."
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"Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound."
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