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To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

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
Enough
Must
Make
Ambitious
Would
Authority
Like
Position
Age
Free
Inspirational

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
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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.
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The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
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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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Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.
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If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
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the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
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Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.
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The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
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Violence can always destroy power out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.
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And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
Hannah Arendt
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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
Hannah Arendt
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The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
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Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt