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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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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
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Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
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More quotes by Hannah Arendt
What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.
Hannah Arendt
If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
Hannah Arendt
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
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
Hannah Arendt
The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
Hannah Arendt
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
Hannah Arendt
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
Hannah Arendt
The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible.
Hannah Arendt
A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
Hannah Arendt
every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
Hannah Arendt
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
Every thought is an afterthought.
Hannah Arendt
Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.
Hannah Arendt
Freedom from labor itself is not new it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
Hannah Arendt
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
Hannah Arendt
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