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

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.
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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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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.
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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Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
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.
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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
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It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
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With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
Hannah Arendt
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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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Kant ... stated that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith, but all he had denied was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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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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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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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt