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The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.

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
Often
Precisely
Many
Peculiar
Even
Ruins
Always
Strongest
Independence
Strength
Overpowered
Purpose
Combine
Individual
Ruin

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.
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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.
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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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The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.
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The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility he can never admit an error.
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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.
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The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
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The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.
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Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.
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Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.
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the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.
Hannah Arendt
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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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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.
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the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.
Hannah Arendt
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Hannah Arendt
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The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.
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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Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home.
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It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
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It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.
Hannah Arendt