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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?

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
Life
True
Cannot
Lived
Stories
Follow
Doe
Whose
Come
Worth
Even
Ought
Make
Told
Thinking
Story

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.
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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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Thought and action must never part company.
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His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
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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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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
Hannah Arendt
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Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.
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Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
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We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
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Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.
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Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
Hannah Arendt
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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
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every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.
Hannah Arendt
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The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
Hannah Arendt
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the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.
Hannah Arendt
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Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
Hannah Arendt
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The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
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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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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Kant ... was also quite aware that the urgent need of reason is both different from and more than mere quest and desire for knowledge. Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.
Hannah Arendt