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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.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Courses
Disappearance
Course
Jeopardy
Peace
Absent
Left
Appears
Ends
Opposites
Power
Rules
Absolutely
Violence

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Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
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I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.
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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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The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
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Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
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Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.
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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.
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Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.
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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.
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All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.
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A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.
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Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand--in the same sense that I have understood--that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.
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The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
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Where all are guilty, no one is confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.
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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
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