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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.

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
World
Assures
Presence
Hear
Others
Reality

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature.
Hannah Arendt
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
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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I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Hannah Arendt
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... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt
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Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
Hannah Arendt
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Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
Hannah Arendt
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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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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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The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
Hannah Arendt
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When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.
Hannah Arendt
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Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Hannah Arendt