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All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

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
Political
Ceases
Power
Decay
People
Manifestation
Cease
Institutions
Soon
Democracy
Uphold
Living
Manifestations

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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
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The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
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These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
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For excellence, the presence of others is always required.
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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.
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For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.
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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.
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
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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.
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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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Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
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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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The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
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Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
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