"The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it."
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Quote collection
Hannah Arendt quotes (page 8 of 15)
282 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act."
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"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle."
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"What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience."
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"The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade."
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"Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought."
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"It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength."
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"Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented."
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"War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford."
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"It is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent"
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"It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent."
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"Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity."
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"Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes."
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"Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor."
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"Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity" would be devoid of meaning."
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"It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country."
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"We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance."
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"The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true."
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"Every thought is an afterthought."
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"Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about."
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