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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

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
Must
Ability
Every
Tell
Erudite
Think
Anything
Relatable
Thinking
Persons
Sane
Able
Ignorant
Person
Demand
Matter
Exercise
Right
Wrong

More quotes by 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 .
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Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
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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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the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.
Hannah Arendt
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
Hannah Arendt
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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
Hannah Arendt
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There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
Hannah Arendt
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Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
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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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
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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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
Hannah Arendt
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Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.
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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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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Since one cannot educate adults, the word education has an evil sound in politics there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.
Hannah Arendt