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Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
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Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
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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

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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.
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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.
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Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.
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Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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.
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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.
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You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.
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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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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
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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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If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it.
Hannah Arendt
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
Hannah Arendt
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Hannah Arendt
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To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
Hannah Arendt
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power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.
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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
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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
Hannah Arendt