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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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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
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Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
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Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Thinking
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Questions
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Violence can always destroy power out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature.
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It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adageThere is no alternative to victory retains a high degree of plausibility.
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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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The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
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A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.
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Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand--in the same sense that I have understood--that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.
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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.
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
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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.
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
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The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
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thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.
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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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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
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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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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.
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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.
Hannah Arendt