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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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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
Results
Regardless
Attention
Specific
Whatever
Content
Evil
Pass
Happens
Activity
Come
Habit
Abstain
Make
Among
Examining
Men
Conditions
Attract

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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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?
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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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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.
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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
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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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The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.
Hannah Arendt
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In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of succcessful businessmen.
Hannah Arendt
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
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.
Hannah Arendt
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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Hannah Arendt
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Every thought is an afterthought.
Hannah Arendt
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The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.
Hannah Arendt
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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
Hannah Arendt
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Hannah Arendt
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While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt