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Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.

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
Stories
Subject
Twofold
Life
Subjects
Sufferer
Actor
Sufferers
Nobody
Namely
Somebody
Producer
Story
Author
Actors
Producers
Sense
Began

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.
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The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
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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.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.
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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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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt
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... the space left to freedom is very small.ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.
Hannah Arendt
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With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
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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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The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
Hannah Arendt
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For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt
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The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt