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Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

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
Humans
Promises
Way
Extent
Commitment
Promise
Humanly
Possible
Ordering
Future
Uniquely
Making
Reliable
Human
Predictable

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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
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To think and to be fully alive are the same.
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
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If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it.
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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.
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Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.
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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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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
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Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
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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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Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.
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Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
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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.
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.
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We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
Hannah Arendt